• Hamlet Batista , Monday, April 21, 2008 1:15 PM

As Hamlet Batista notes, a solid link-building strategy involves equal parts link-baiting and link-conquesting--and he delves into the pros and cons of each tactic.

"Chasing links is the traditional way of building links," Batista says. "This includes things like submitting your site to directories, creating press releases, submitting articles and comments with your site link and anchor text, and other strategies."

Aggressively pursuing links gives you the ability to pick and choose which kinds of sites you get them from--meaning you can stick to high authority, highly relevant Web sites and reap the benefits. The only con is that it can take hard work--and it isn't a tactic that you can readily outsource, "because it requires personal rapport," Batista says. "It necessitates having your own voice and building a connection with representatives of other sites. Clearly, it also takes a whole lot of time and patience."

On the other hand, getting people to link to you without asking them is the idea behind link-baiting. This tactic is based on developing exciting, interesting content--be it an article, a video, a widget--and enticing the influencers in your niche to pick it up.

"When successful, a good link bait will yield a massive amount of links," Batista says. Outside of crafting the content, link-baiting is less labor-intensive and more cost effective, and your link profile will be flush with lots of different kinds of anchor text and many different Web sites. The cons stem from the fact that you aren't in control of where the links come from, or what they'll look like (you're aiming for targeted, keyword-rich text, aren't you?), and there's no guarantee that you'll be successful.

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