There are lots of interesting link building techniques shared that are supposedly very effective and can improve your SEO. They include using .edu sites to the common suggestion of commenting on blogs to building tools for others to spread ubiquitously across the Internet.

3 presenters: Roger Montti, Jay Young and Stephan Spencer. Montti has about 27k in monthly visitors to his site, Young about 2k and Spencer gets about 40k+ if there’s any indication about how effective they are (Compete.com numbers). I’m going to order the technique(s) presenters by site traffic placing Spencer here at the top in contrast to the post where he was last.

Spencer’s suggestions for effective link building techniques to better your SEO:

• building a link building spider
• look for sites that are one-click away from Google as well as sites with very high PageRank
• Don’t forget to link build your existing links, as well. Mine your existing backlinks for opportunities to revise the anchor text
• Comment on blogs that allow follow of comment links, like Blogmaveric.com
• Submit to blog carnivals, host one or start a new one. (That sounds fun!) Contribute to a group blog or be a guest blogger
• Look for bloggers desperate for cash, and buy a link on their site
• Along with networking online with bloggers, register and attend conferences so you can network in person, too. Contribute to conference wikis of conferences you’ve attended. Give free talks at libraries and campuses or get involved with local meetups and get a profile page on that site. Invite the W3C to speak at your event and get a link from them to your event
• Contribute to Wikipedia and other wikis. Contributing top or creating a prominent entry will give you credibility. You can also create your own wiki
• Viral videos are another good way to build links
• try quizzes, personality tests, and again, widgets
• for the more technical or the coders out there:
  • Write a WordPress plugin
  • Write a Firefox extension
  • Release software as Open Source

…when reviewing Spencer’s tips, I find that a lot of this is relatively wise and may make sense why he has the highest traffic according to Compete.com of these 3. His wise techniques and tricks packed presentation is located here.

Montti’s effective link building technique(s) to better a web site’s SEO:

• focusing on .edu links because they’re typically in good neighborhoods and they’re free
• to find where to get the links, do searches on your competitors
  • do Google searches & see who’s buying adwords; check out their backlinks
  • use the following Yahoo.com commands to find some other .edu sites:
    • linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “bookmarks”
    • linkdomain:example.com site:edu “links”
    • linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “favorite sites”
    • linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “your product or services”

Young’s basic tips or techniques on building links to enhance a site’s search engine optimization:

• grow some balls — ha!
• use directories despite the negative flack about them
  • Best of the web
  • Yahoo
  • DMOZ
  • Joe Ant
  • Blog Catalogue
• get links from non-profit specialists
• “SEOcialists” are another place to look, like Digg, Reditt and Stumble
• “…buying links is essential to the success of a competitive campaign, but be relevant & natural as possible. Vary your anchor text and use co-citation. “
• he suggests some “darker methods (techniques)” that supposedly are still effective.
  • comment spam
  • trackback spam
  • reciprocal links
  • three ways
  • link farms
• “good techniques out of the box”:
  • template sponsorship (find the most popular WordPress templates, contact the creator, and pay him to put your link on the bottom of the template)
  • contests (give away an iPhone!)
• bonus tips for us. Hire bartenders. They’re hard workers, technically inclined, and can make you a drink…
• some techniques Young tells you to avoid:
  • avoid buying links from forums
  • avoid any site with hidden links by scanning the source code
  • if the competition is too clean, mess it up by pointing dirty links to them (??? Maybe this is why Young has less traffic than the other two presenters ???)

Lastly, “a major thing to remember about getting links is that you don’t want to stand out in your market/vertical. You just want to be a little bit better.”

**note: The original and more detail list of the following suggestions are located here on Bruce Clay’s site summarized by Virginia Nussey, but I’ve summarized the somewhat long post into this bullet point post — even though I couldn’t minimize it significantly. The various tips that were given were already truncated a bit & so this won’t be exactly “2 the point,” but qualifies since it did reduce the points to bullet points.