Not be sneaky, be manipulative, be crafty, be deceptive. Not even be brilliant. Just Be Smart. Let me elaborate.

There are lots of ways to trick the engines and get ahead of the competition. Believe me, I know. I’ve seen the results via my clients’ competitors. And not just for those long tail keywords, but for big money keywords as well. There are lots of ways to try and circumvent the system. And Web pages are becoming disposable. Buy an aged domain with lots of links, buy some links and Voila! You have top 10 rankings for some big keywords. Sounds easy, right? And it has some serious short term (aka “flash in the pan”) results.

But that’s not how my team does it. We are interested in long term gains. We work for links that stand the test of time and add value to both users (being our primary focus) and search engines (secondary). Yes, we build links to build rankings, but more than that we want to give every user the best user experience possible.

When you’re creating a strategy, be smart. When you are choosing sites to request links from, be smart. When you reach out to that site and make the request, be smart. Don’t try and do something underhanded to get quick results. If you need quick results, try PPC. Above all else, use your head. You’ll be a better link builder for it.

1. How many links do I currently have?

2. Where are those links coming from? Directories? Random blog posts? Educational sites?

3. Who am I looking to target? Coming up with two or three personas can be very helpful.

4. What is my brand position? How do I want the public to see my site / company?

5. What are my business goals?

6. How will I define success?

7. How will I measure statistics to determine if I have achieved that level of success?

8. What resources do I currently have to work with.

Obviously, the answers to these questions will indicate a number of things in terms of your link building campaign. Your audience will determine where you are looking to get links from. Your brand indicates what caliber of sites you are looking at and what, specifically, you will be saying on those sites. The amount of resources will determine what you can do now and what you will have to build up to.  Defining your analytics can help tie in a whole other group of individuals, or spur you into learning how to use the analytics you already have running on your site.

Of course, these are not all the questions you should ask when starting, but this is definitely a list of “must-asks” and it will open the door to all those other things that you need to learn about your company or site and how it will apply to your link building and overall SEO efforts.

 I started at Brulant in February of 2006 and was given the task of evaluating our link acquisition process. Within weeks, I was immersed in the world of link building, reading articles from industry experts like Eric Ward among others. The world of link acquisition was bigger and broader than I initially thought and I began to experiment with all types of link building, distinguishing the white hat tactics from the black hat tactics, not that this was an easy task. Long story short, I became hooked.

I’m fascinated by the nature of humans, especially how they act online. I began to explore the concept of why people link to other sites in the first place. Eventually, I started heading up processes and building out customized strategies for clients in a variety of industries. And that brings me to where I am today.

Recently, I had someone ask me “what do you do all day?” The easy answer is “build links.” But that’s easier said than done and there is more to it than just that. So here is a look at a typical day for me:

4:00 am – the alarm starts to go off. I wake up with my head full of tasks that need to be accomplished, topics I need to research, and sites I need to evaluate. Often times, a concept/ idea that started blooming the night before is still on my mind first thing in the morning.

4:30 am – I sit down with a cup of coffee and a good book. I read a variety of things and I am always looking for new ways to connect two seemingly dissimilar things together.

5:30 am – I’m off to work, listening to books like Freakonomics, Cluetrain Manifesto, and Linked – the New Science of Networks.

6:30 am – I arrive at work (I have a slight detour to take my kids to the sitter, hence the long commute), fire up the laptop and begin working.

6:30 – 3:00 pm – This part of my day varies the most. It’s generally full of client meetings, brainstorm sessions, regroups, and reporting analysis. I also spend a good portion of this time executing a lot of our strategies. The big point about this whole chunk of time is that I often have very little time to research new things. This I reserve for evenings. In an average 8 hour work day, I have rougly 2 – 3 hours when I am not in meetings or being pulled into conversations about the status of a project.

3:00 pm – Shut down and head home. Again, I’m usually listening to a book on CD, but sometimes, I drive in silence, brainstorming ideas. I carry a digital voice recorder with me so I don’t forget anything by the time I get home.

4:30 pm – I arrive home and start doing the typical “just got home” stuff: make dinner, do laundry, give the kids a bath, etc.

6:00 pm – Fire up the laptop again, check emails and get in touch with people as necessary.

8:00 pm – Kids go to bed, so I start researching. Generally, when I research I start with one particular topic in mind and I let myself wander online, gauging how I find the sites that I do and what is typically catching my attention. I work on client projects, do research relevant to their vertical, create and edit deliverables, etc.

11:00 pm – I call it a day and go to bed. But not until I lay in bed for a bit, brainstorming just a bit more before falling asleep.