There is no such thing as perfection, whether we are talking about beauty, technology or link building, however there are many ways to try getting as close as possible to a great link profile. We are aware that nofollow links do not pass the same value as dofollow links pass, we are aware that getting anchor text links with good keywords to our site definitely helps when it comes to search engine results but can we exclude nofollow or non-anchored links from our link building strategies?

Certainly now and this is only because a natural link building profile should look as diversified as possible. Think about it: popular websites receiving links as credit to their content only get anchor text links? Are they receiving only dofollow backlinks? No way! They are getting links with brand name as anchor, they are getting links with “click here” as anchor and they are probably getting a few percents of nofollow links as well.

Best way to follow this approach is by analysing your own or your clients’ link profile and be sincere: does it look natural for you? If it does not, then probably search engines will not consider it natural as well and what can be done when you are facing this issue?

The best answer is to continue link building but with a different approach: build www.site.com links, build links with your brand name as anchor and also get links from as many places as possible. Diversity is the key, whether we are talking about platforms from where we are building links or about anchor text used in our link building campaign.

If you are a local business selling a certain product/service, one of the best things you can do to continue being a strong presence in local search engine results is to build local links. These can both help you in your entire SEO strategy but they are also great citations for Google Places as well.

Here are some top notch ideas to get some local links and citations for your business:

1. Local business directories

These are probably the most used opportunities. Just use queries like “list your business” + city name, city name+keyword+get a listing, city name+keyword+add your business etc. and you should be getting some nice local places for grabbing some links.

2. Local events sponsorships

There are many organisations that accept sponsors when they are planning an event and the best thing when doing this is that many of them are usually linking out to sponsors from their website. Searching for local events from your city and getting some “safe paid links” from sponsorships could increase your local authority with ease. Along with sponsorships you can use queries containing city name and donate, city name and help me raise money and so on. There will be a handful of link opportunities there.

3. Links from local authority sites

Have you ever seen pages like “local businesses” on sites like let’s say Chamber of Commerce? Those are the perfect places to get some extra links and/or citations for your online local business.

4. Local forums

Although you are not getting so much value from a signature or bio link, these are great because they contribute to link diversity and also strengthen your local authority. Whether we are talking about weight loss forums or local events forums, they all worth getting a link from, when being local laser targeted.

5. Local service providers

You have probably used many local services in the past, from cleaners to movers and even plumbers maybe. Not all but many of those service providers usually offer the opportunity of getting a backlink by writing a testimonial. Think about what local service providers you have used in the past and write them back, asking them if they would be willing to publish your testimonial in exchange of a link to your website. A great way for grabbing some local citations.

Link building takes time, whether we are talking about manual labour or tools that can help us doing it. However, which one of these two methods is better? Should you go spending hundreds/thousands of dollars on different tools or do all your link building manually? Let’s see some examples below:

First things first, there are some instances where automatic link building cannot be used, let’s take for example personalised emails for link opportunities. Of course, there are tools that can help you with this but don’t you really hate it when you receive those “robotic-alike” emails? Indeed, manual on this case works better.

Directory submission is definitely to be handled manually. Although there are tons of great tools to automate all of these processes, they cannot distinguish between good, medium or spam directories – they just come packed with a number of directories and guess what category to list your website in. On the other hand, doing it manually you get the opportunity of sorting the wheat from the chaff and finding only those opportunities that are worth the effort.

Harvesting for relevant blogs and forums almost cannot be done without tools like Hrefer or Scrapebox. Yes, you can type different operators in Google and pick the first let’s say 100 results but most of the times this is not enough. With the above mentioned tools, things become much easier: load a bunch of related keywords, load your footprints, use good proxies and see the lists coming in. Now this is something where automation beats manual labour.

Article marketing – this one depends solely on each individual. If you want to submit article only to top 3 directories you write down 3 solid pieces of content and manually submit them. But what if you want to do a mass submission to let’s say 1,000 article directories? You need a good spinner with a good submission tool – this is exactly where TheBestSpinner and ArticleMarketingRobot can help. Again, it all depends on what are you trying to achieve.

On the other hand, increasing exposure on forums could need both automation and manual labour:

-          Automation for finding those highly-relevant community forums

-          Manual labour for contributing to community, increasing exposure and why not, getting a backlink to your website, in a white-hat manner.

You might think that link building is designed only to help your keywords rank higher in Google’s organic search results and it does not have any relevancy in context with Google Places. However, while Google Places it’s strictly related to geo-targeted results, it is almost an obvious thing that certain links from certain websites can definitely help your Places listing rank higher.

Here are some tips to help your listing get a higher letter in Google Places results:

1.      Anchor text

Whether you are trying to rank higher for a keyword like “search engine optimisation firm” in organic listings or for a geo-targeted one like “Trowbridge search engine optimisation firm” in Google Places, a link anchored with the second long-tail keyword can help you in both cases. First, you add some link diversity to your link profile, thus helping you in organic results and second, you are strengthening your local relevancy.

2.      Page/website relevancy

If a Trowbridge targeted news website links to you, whether with or without an anchor text, this can help as well by being relevant to your location. Finding local opportunities can be most of the times easier than you think, from local business directories to local newspapers and local bloggers, all these can easily give you a valuable link.

3.      IPs

Though this is a more difficult one, getting links from websites hosted on local servers can make the difference. Of course, this is not something to start running for right away but it is a great method to add to your “link building for Google Places” arsenal.

Grabbing some good backlinks for your website can be the difference between top 3 position and bottom of page 1 in search engine results. Of course, everyone seems to be running to find the perfect links for their sites but do those really exist?

We cannot say this for sure but we can show you some “tips” regarding what websites to target for your link building efforts.

1.      Website’s popularity and authority

A website that you want a link on should be an authority in its niche. Whether we are talking about thousands of backlinks or thousands of daily visitors, it must provide some real value to the industry and thus being a trustful website for the search engines.

2.      Same industry

There are many voices that claim relevancy is not of such high value as some folks think, but instead of risking this you should definitely concentrate on grabbing links from as many relevant websites as possible. Say you are in the web design niche, that does not mean only web design websites should be your target but also all-related sites to the online environment; from SEO websites to Internet marketing, those are all relevant in the eyes of search engines.

3.      High rankings

If the website already has some high rankings in search engines for some good keywords in your niche it could be a great choice for your link building efforts. Try to “ask” some related queries on Google and see what websites come on first page, these should be your target, whether they are blogs, Q&A websites or even Wikipedia…

4.      Number of outbound links

Always target websites that do not sell links and that are not a “link farm” in essence. Try to keep the number of outbound links on a page under 5. however, stay as far as possible from the “bad neighborhood”!

We all know that white hat link building is the proper way to go, but when it comes to black hat tools they can also be used in a legit way to help in our link building efforts.

Here are some tools that can definitely help you further, whether we are talking about white hat or black hat tools that can be used “different”:

1. Scrapebox

Considered by most folks “the ultimate black hat tool for spamming blogs”, this one can be used in a “lighter” way as well:

-          Built-in proxy checker:  need proxies? Grab a list of proxies, add them to the proxy checker and start testing; you will end up with a good list with low latency that can be used for whatever you would like

-          Harvester: Scrapebox harvester is great for finding niche-related blogs and forums on which you can contribute, start building a relationship and expose your website/services/products in a whiter way

-          Ping: we all know how difficult is sometimes to get posts/links indexed; the pinger can be of real help

2. Hrefer

Comes with Xrumer, this is considered the best harvester ever. Just upload a list of keywords, proxies and footprints and start scrapping forums, blogs, directories or whatever you need for your link building efforts. Set and forget.

3. Magic Submitter

This tool developed by Alex Krulik can be used for social bookmarking, forums profiles, article marketing and so on. One thing that puts this tool ahead of others is the fact that it has a learning curve: basically, you can teach the tool new platforms and use it on a daily basis.

4. Article marketing robot

As the name says, it is used for article marketing. With over 6,000 built-in directories, it is one of the most popular bots for article marketing. Works with de-captcha services as well. However, with the Farmer update it seems that it’s value is getting lower and lower…

5. Tweet Attacks

Tweet Attacks is an awesome marketing tool for Twitter efforts. From mass follow/un-follow to tweeting and finding tweets related to your product, this is a “must-have” tool.