Low-quality links are like one-night stands – they're easy to find and may be fun for a while, but you can't expect to build anything lasting out of them. Real link-love takes a long-term view and a commitment that too many website owners seem unwilling to make.

I want to tell you a story to try to convince you that building strong, natural links is worth the effort. This is a story from my own blog. I'm not trying to be egotistical, but I want you to understand that this isn’t a story about how yet another post on SEOmoz's 60,000+ subscriber blog went hot. This is something I made happen on a small blog with a niche audience, and I think anyone is capable of similar success.

How We First Met

It was late 2008, and I was struggling to find some focus for my consulting business and overall marketing strategy. I had a usability blog that was slowly gaining steam, averaging about 60 unique visitors/day and a couple-hundred subscribers, but traffic peaked when I posted and languished the rest of the month. Search-engine traffic was a trickle at best.

I started thinking hard about my process and how I could better package it. Over a month or so, I took some of my core experiences, combined them with industry best practices and came up with a 25-point usability checklist to use for new clients. This was so well-received by clients and peers that I started thinking about turning it into a blog post and free download. I was worried at first – was I giving away too much? I finally decided I needed to take a few marketing risks, so I bit the bullet and released my checklist on February 10, 2009.

Love at First Sight?

Hindsight is 20/20, but I want you to understand that this was hardly a movie love story. My post didn't hit the home-page of Digg, crashing my servers in fiery glory. This isn't a story about how I got a ton of traffic on one magical day – it's about how natural linking has provided me with over a year of traffic and is still going strong.

Here's a graph of monthly traffic to this blog post since its launch in February 2009:

More than a year after writing it, the post still averages over 100 unique views per day. As of April, it's driven a total of more than 56,000 unique views.

The Link Love Grows

This is more than just a story about traffic. This single blog post has acquired almost 800 inbound links (according to Yahoo! Site Explorer), including a few heavy hitters like Smashing Magazine, Search Engine Journal, and Occam's Razor. The post was a 2010 SEMMYs finalist and was mentioned in Avinash Kaushik's latest book, "Web Analytics 2.0" (p. 171, if you have a copy :) ).

So, have these links translated into SEO value? Absolutely. To date, search-engine traffic has driven 9,632 visits to this page from 2,563 keyword variations. It's also done wonders for my ranking – here are just a few examples from SEOmoz's RankTracker tool:

It's not shocking that this post might get me the top spot for "website usability checklist", but it has also propelled my overall site to the #7 spot for "website usability", a much more competitive query (Jakob Nielsen holds the top spot).

Some Relationship Advice

Of course, I don't want this story to be all about me. My goal is to show you that building natural links not only has real business value, but that it's achievable even for smaller sites in niche industries. This is my advice to you for achieving lasting link-love:

(1) Don't Take Yourself for Granted

A while back, I heard George Wright speak about how he came up with the idea for the "Will It Blend?" videos. The short version is that he was touring the production facility when he came across a bunch of QA engineers running crazy things through Blendtec blenders. He was amazed by what he saw, but they took it for granted (blending two-by-fours was their job, after all). I love this story, because it's so applicable to any business. There's something about your product or service that is amazing, but because you see it every day, you take it for granted. Put down your mission statement and PowerPoint slides and see your product through your customers' eyes. If you can't, go find a fresh perspective.

You have a story worth telling, even if you don't know it. If you think your industry is too "boring" for link-bait, then you're not trying hard enough. As my Dad likes to say, only boring people get bored.

(2) Be Careful Who You Love

Low-quality links are attractive because they seem easy, but are they really? Let's look at some hypothetical times to build one link based on common tactics:

• Directory Submissions – 15-30 minutes
• Article Marketing – 15-60 minutes
• Email Link Requests – 60-90 minutes

You might balk at that last one – finding and emailing one prospect should only take a couple of minutes, right? Ok, but what's your conversion rate on those emails, maybe 1-2%? Let's say it takes you 1 minute/email – you're talking about 50-100 minutes to get one link back (I rounded down to be generous).

So, what would it take to build 800 links, even low-quality ones? At a very generous estimate of 15 minutes/link, you're talking about 200 hours of work. Even counting research and testing on my target audience, I'd estimate that my checklist blog post took about 40 hours. My last e-book took 30 hours to research, write, and do layout. Do low-quality links still seem like a bargain?

(3) Natural Link-Love Is Real

Low-quality links are superficial. What you get in return for them is a tiny bit of SEO value, driving people to content that usually isn't strong enough to get any love on its own. Building strong content that attracts natural links does more than build SEO value. It builds a real audience and actual, in-person relationships.

In 2010, I've calculated that roughly 65% of my revenue can be traced back to either blogging or social media. Great content gets the attention of like-minded people and builds your brand. It almost magically makes every piece of content that comes after it stronger.

The flipside of this equation is that it takes real relationships to drive natural links. Take 50% of the time you spend building low-quality links and spend it participating – get to know the communities, blogs, and linkerati in your industry niche. Give back to those communities, and when the time comes that you have something really outstanding to share, you'll already have an audience for it.