Why do my most companies fail in their link-building?

In my experience, many companies fail in their link-building, even when they know it's important, because an integrated approach is not used. Many other companies fail because they don't know the importance of backlinks to SEO, so they just concentrate on on-page optimisation. This post talks about companies who know its importance.

I was reminded of this when browsing the June issue of the excellent Search Marketing Standard (everyone serious about SEO should be a subscriber). In an article Link by Link: Reconstructing the Past 15 Years, link-building specialist Eric Ward reviewed some of his learnings from the last 15 years and I thought it would be useful to pass on a summary of his key learnings and recommendations - they're relevant to everyone:  site owners, marketers, PRs and of course SEOs.

These are the 3 paras I think are most relevant to succesful link building:

"1. Link-building is nearly indistinguishable from public relations"

Eric explains: "If you regard links solely as an SEO function, link-building initiatives may end up creating an unnatural inbound link profile. Fix this by working toward more cooperation between the public relations, marketing, sales and SEO teams".

In other words, successful link-building isn't limited to work by an SEO specialist adding links to directories, or adding anchor text to press releases. It requires the garnering of links to be a structured marketing activity built into all PR and marketing campaigns. I see many great campaigns which don't harness their link-building potential.

"2. Be honest when a client has a site with no true distinguishing content to their 20 competitors"

You can see from this guideline that the article is written for SEOs and he is describing a common situation faced by SEOs. I, and many other SEOs have found this "some clients are perfectly willing to do what they need to do to stand out, whether that means adding content, resources, tools, or even refocusing on a narrow vertical approach. Others are not".

So, if you're serious about SEO and link-building, then creating new content and tools to add value to visitors is essential and you will have to think laterally across the whole team about the types of  content that will attract links. It will need resource and a separate project to develop this. Product pages and press releases alone will not work! Creation of compelling content and resources doesn't happen by accident!

"3. It's not the link-builder that get's the links. It's your client's content that must earn the links"

To reinforce the point, Eric says that "the easier it is to get the link, the less value that link is likely to have as an algorithmic sign of trust". He's saying that the benefit of great linkbait content is that it will tend to attract better quality and more natural links.

So, how seriously do you take link-building in your company? Is it a structured, managed process integrated into all campaigns or is it an afterthought or doesn't it happen at all? It's all too common that there isn't a structured, proactive approach and without this, your link-building and SEO will fail.

Which approaches have worked best for you?