When one approaches and plans link building strategies in 2012, one wants to keep ones methods 100% white hat. Search engines change their rules and algorithms all the time. Unfortunately, when you don’t play by their rules, they could penalize you and de-rank your content or worse, de-list you altogether.

What I’ve realized is that the best link building methods are the ones where the efforts are community based. These are networks where you build a ‘sharing’ network and work together with others to create dominance online. Some of these groups are secret, and therefore joining them is usually only by invitation.
I will share with you my link building strategies and some secrets that is not revealed very often in the best of forums or blogs on online marketing.

Social blog networks.
The main purpose of these networks is to build community around a certain niche. The benefits (besides link building) are:

• Building a brand
• Creating exposure
• Networking
• Becoming part of a community

Let me share with you how these platforms work:

Obviously, you have to be a member. Some do charge for their services, but most of them are free. Signing up is easy. Make sure that your entire profile is filled out and you have links posted to your main site. This is important because as you interact on the sites, links are built, traffic garnered etc.
Submit your latest article (or the one you’d like to build links to).
Once your article is submitted, start interacting. You can interact by voting on other articles, commenting on the article on the blog and commenting on the post within the blog network. Usually the site has its own blog, become visible on there as well. Every interaction builds your links directly or indirectly.
I would advise submitting links to more than one platform – widening your exposure and link network.
Here are some stats (from my own experiences):

A month after using just one of these platforms,

1. my Google Page Rank went from 0 to 4.
2. Google recognized 17,000 links directing to my site in as little as 3 months.
3. The platform became top 5 traffic referrer.
4. Some of these platforms offer services where they feed your content automatically, saving you time.

Some of my favorite platforms are:

• Blogengage
• Bloginteracz
• Blokube
• BizSugar and
• SERPD

I recommend this above all methods to build links for your website and blog, else  my #1 way to build high quality, high PR links is Link building networks. These networks are usually ‘hush-hush’ and very secret, very tough to qualify for and usually work after invitation only. But this is how they work:

There is a network of people that have high traffic and high PR blogs (to help with the link juice)
Using tools to measure authority metrics, they look for posts that carry a lot of authority.

• Bloggers and webmasters request links from each other on a regular, consistent but not progressive fashion (say, once a week), and they place links on their sites with anchor texts for certain keywords.
  This is usually a gentleman (or lady)’s agreement between bloggers and webmasters within the same niche. Not only are the links high quality and high PR, but they’re from trusted sources.
  If you don’t find networks like this or haven’t received an invite after being active online for some time, I would suggest you start your own.
• Commenting with CommentLuv.

  There are a lot of commenting plugins and platforms but CommentLuv makes  best sense to me. From a link building viewpoint, it works like this (remember that commenting is usually a good way to build links and exposure, but this is supercharged):

• You seek blogs within your niche that has the CommentLuv plugin installed.

• Comment on the blog using your anchor text in the name field (CommentLuv makes it capable for you to place your name + your keyword in the name field). It would appear thus: yourname@youranchortext.
• When you’re finished commenting, you have a link to your site (or whichever url you posted) built to your site with your desired anchor text. It’s a lot of work, but worth every minute spent on it.

Note: Not every blog/site powered with CommentLuv has this feature, as it only appears in the premium version of the plugin. If you want this kind of link juice from a particular blog and they don’t have the premium version installed, you can suggest they install a plugin ‘KeywordLuv’ which serves the same purpose. This is of course if they are running their site on the WordPress platform.
And finally…
Sitemaps.
I have heard webmasters and SEO experts mention this, but most people only do this once. What you need to do are as follows:

• Create a sitemap of your site by using different plugins of online web tools.
• Submit the sitemap to all the search engines you can find, most of them have pages where you could submit your sitemap.
• Repeat this action regularly.
• Ps. Whileyou’re at it, submit your RSS feed to RSS aggregators as well. Every time you post a new post, a link is built to it on the platform you submitted the feed to

Those are the top link building strategies I know of and will be using in 2012. Be careful of link building companies that just submit links willy-nilly. When you hire someone, make sure you acquire information regarding their strategy.

Finally stay away from the following methods as they will harm your site:

• Posting PLR or spun articles on article directories. These haven’t worked since July 2010.
• Automated software that automatically posts links to sites. Nothing that is done by a robot is not beneficial for your site and they are easily detected by search engines these days. You may get dropped from the Serps immediately.
• Any form of spamming or black hat SEO Techniques used via comments, forums or on blogging networks is not a good idea.

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