Better Ways to get some Link Love

Those of you who are weary of my anti-blogroll rants (sorry, Ben!) will be happy to know that I’ve decided to take a more positive, user-friendly, happy, less-angry approach to encouraging my fellow bloggers to attract links without the silly mile-long list of blogs in the sidebar.

We all know links are necessary to build page rank. (We all DO know that, right? Of course we do.) And hopefully, we know by now that scripted blogrolls are not the way to do that effectively (see Why Blogrolling is Useless, and Using [and Abusing?] rel=”nofollow” to Preserve Page Rank.

S,o what are some better ways to attract linksthat are also search-engine friendly (Word for the day: in the SEO world, these are called “white hat” techniques, as opposed to “black hat” techniques that will only work until search engines like Google find a way to block them)?

1. Writing great original content that other bloggers and websites want to link to is always a good option (and the preferred one), then use your social networking skills to draw readers and bloggers to your content.
2. E-Mail other bloggers, with links to your best stories, and ask them to link to you. You might suggest a link exchange, in which you also link to one of their pillar posts, or a recent post.
3. Post an open invitation for bloggers to exchange links on a specific topic. For a good example of this in action, see Careerealism.
4. Create images or content with basic html code that for other bloggers to embed in their websites. One of the most well-known examples of this in action is ICanHazCheezburger.com

Do you have other ideas? We’d love to hear them!