As the head of a good sized SEO team, I've been getting us off the drug of paid for links over the last 12 months. We're nearly clean and we're determined to stay that way.

Inspired by Eric Enge's post Getting the Anchor Text You Want, I thought it would be useful for me to share some of the things we're doing that has made that possible and perhaps get fellow professionals' thoughts.

We use a portfolio of 5 techniques at present:

Directories - There are a few dozen good ones out there and they are low hanging fruit.

Authorities -  We've taken the time to build a contact database of local authorities (.gov) and university (.ac) websites that, if the site is right, offer links out.

Blogs - We get involved with blogs. Both our own blogs, real ones with a heart beat (non-faux-blogs), our clients' blogs, and other blogs we build relationships with and contribute content, comments, etc. We see the content as the 'splash' and then the social networking / bookmarking of the content 'the ripple'. This works well for us.

PR - Using sites like PRWeb, we do re-work and distribute content with often surprisingly good results.

Content Distribution - We create great opinionated content and offer it for FREE to sites that use syndicated content or bloggers that want blog-like opinionated content to keep their blog turning over to supplement their activity. All we ask is that the first link on the page is ours.

And this is where we are. We're a unique content rich SEO team, and we look for homes for the content. We see it as a bit of a mash-up between a PR agency and SEO agency.

It works well and rankings for often really competitive terms emerge relatively quickly, and more importantly for us is transparency. We can tell and show our clients exactly what we're doing. Every link of it. We even get them involved in bookmarking the content! 

Now for one really important ingredient: doing it naturally. We obsess over this. If every page of a site has a link to one of our clients we assume it would raise suspicion. The same goes for having 3 links to the same client on one post or article. We try and mix other sites in, even if they are not our clients. If when using content you ask the question, "Would that have looked like that if I wasn't engineering it?", then I think you're half way there and a little more evolved than most. With the Big G watching, we assume the worst and hope for the best.

If you have found this useful, have comments or advice, or are interested it receiving content, I'd love to hear from you.