If you’ve ever done any search engine optimizing, I bet I can guess the facet of SEO that makes you cringe the most.

Link building.

Was I dead on?  Then let me assume some more.  You’re exasperated by the thought of pleading with hundreds of webmasters for linkbacks and submitting your site to obscure web directories — all with the ever-looming possibility that in the end, you’ll have little return on your time investment.  Let’s face it, link building is grueling work.  And so the elusive holy grail of Google PageRank remains a nightmare that haunts you in your sleep.

If this air of frustration describes you as well as it describes me, then perhaps you’ll be inspired by this bit of underrated link building truth:

A critical component of link building is content building.

Why is this true?  Just think about the cybersphere in which we live today.  What are the avenues by which you find content that interests you?  Search engines, for sure.  But there’s the Diggs, the Twitters, the blogs — to generalize, social sharing mediums.  And, to state the obvious, you find content that interests you by clicking links within social sharing mediums!  So the sites that get shoutouts in the social channels may see direct benefits in the search world, too.

Why is this good news? The more conventional aspects of link building often seem uncontrollable.  There’s no guarantee, for instance, that a webmaster you contact will agree to link to your site.  Content building, on the other hand, has a guaranteed return!  Sure, writing a compelling article won’t guarantee you a million Diggs.  It won’t guarantee you substantial movement in the search engines.  But linkbacks or not, you’ve ended up with something valuable — compelling content for your users.

And that’s just the bare minimum.  Dream for a moment that your content catches on with your niche audience, and links to your site spread like wildfire in the blogosphere.  This is not the story of dimishing returns to which you’re accustomed in link building land.  Quite the contrary: this is economies of scale.  Your audience is building links for you!

I began considering the impact of content on link building when I ran across the following article:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-build-links-with-lists/8183/

Ann makes a great point about how a specific type of content — lists — is particularly conducive to sharing.  Now extrapolate from her insight.  What other types of content could you put on your website or blog to appeal to your target niche?

It’s only January 6th…still plenty of time for a belated New Year’s SEO resolution!