My team and I have spent a lot of time, like most of the industry, doing the 'hard yards' finding potential back links to our clients' sites. We use some great tools. These include:

• The Juicy Link Finder: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/link-finder
• Yahoo Site Explorer: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
• Backlink Watch: http://www.backlinkwatch.com/
• Link Hound: http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php
• Web CEO: http://www.webceo.com/online-promotion-new/link-exchange-tool.htm

I would be really interested to know whether anyone else has found better tools than these?

But knowing where your competitors are getting their links from, looking through hundreds of sites, and finding an angle to get what you want is very very time consuming. This has led many SEO teams to outsource this part of the link building mix to countries where manpower is cheaper.

The Paid For’s

If the budgets there, there are lots of ways to supplement the 'hard yard' links with paid for links. They include:

Blog post link providers:

• Pay Per Post: http://payperpost.com/
• Blogvertise: http://www.blogsvertise.com/
• Sponsored Reviews: http://www.sponsoredreviews.com/
• Buy Blog Review: http://www.buyblogreviews.com/

Text Link providers:

• Text Link Ads: http://www.text-link-ads.com/
• Link Worth: http://www.linkworth.com/
• Link Adage: http://www.linkadage.com/
• Back Links: http://www.backlinks.com/

And, of course, Direct To Source. Lots of bloggers are happy to quote you for providing you with posts or links from within their site.

Sustainability & Nature

Throwing money at the problem is great, but it is expensive to sustain.  It is also risky if you do it in a clumsy way, as I strongly believe Google’s ability to spot suspicious unnatural linking patterns is getting better all the time. For example:

1. PageRank Range - What is the ‘normal’ PageRank distribution of links to a domain, meaning how many PR 0, 1, 2, 3 ,4 , 5, etc. links would a site get naturally? Too many PR 5’s would get picked up, in my opinion. I read a research document Yahoo published that said they know what normal is and can detect link spammers.
2. Growth Rate - What is natural link growth? We know too many, too quick can hurt you.
3. Target Page Distribution - What is natural link target distribution between optimised pages, the homepage, and other relevant pages?
4. Anchor Spread – What is the natural spread of anchors used (the URL to keyword and the keyword anchor spread)? If the only keyword going to your site is ‘Credit Card’ plus a handful of others, surely this raises suspicion.

So what’s a more evolved approach?

It has been talked about for a while but never really got there, but I think PR and SEO are beginning to enter a mash-up phase. PR agencies distribute great press releases with no thought to anchor text. SEO companies distribute average content with no thought to REAL PR. How we form closer bonds between these two disciplines is really key for me whilst taking into account the ‘what is natural’ part of the process.

I think this also feeds into on-site optimisation becoming more important. A site needs great content that is worth linking to. Call it link bait if you like, I call it plain useful. We’re increasingly finding that good internal linking strategies deliver us increasingly good results with much lighter weight linking. Has anyone else noticed this? Is the industry going full circle – onsite becoming as important as off-site?

A great way to check out how your internal links are structured is to use Xenu’s Link Sleuth: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html . If you look at your SEO optimised pages and what proportion of internal links are going to them, you more often than not find them being of relatively low importance to the site as a whole.

Whilst Google, the SEO industry, and our techniques evolve we have to get our clients ROI positive, which may mean using a wide portfolio or techniques.  But aspiring to work smarter and more naturally is a good objective worth focusing a decent amount of your brain power on.

Comments and shared know-how are welcome!