Recently, on my advice, our site turned down a submission for an article on link building. My gut reaction when asked about any article on link building is that is too much a gray area of SEO and we shouldn’t even open ourselves up to that. I admit to an invested interest here in keeping things white hat only. My position has always been if you build good pages with compelling content the link building will happen organically. This is easy for me to say because I work on a large corporate Web site with a huge online presence.

But there is value in link building, if done carefully. My guide has always been Aaron Wall’s post on good link building and bad link building.

And I just saw Eric Enge’s post up on SEOmoz: So Many Ways to Pursue Links and So Little Time and I’ll be adding that to my link building resource list as well.

There are eight solid tips in Enge’s post that reflect the same white hat values as Aaron Wall’s post (and I am sure many many others), with some new ones as well — for example, links on edu and .gov links are often overlooked as a good source for establishing authority. This post covers everything from Social media to PR to the blogosphere.  All good stuff. But Enge also doesn’t lose site of the goal.  His final paragraph includes this comment :

Match your content to the target and you will have a much greater chance of success.

I concur.  Keep your end result in mind and your link building will be successful. Don’t spray your links all over the interwebs and expect your target audience to take the action you want them to take.  Instead, take some time to match your link to the audience,  get quality links, and good things will happen with your linking campaign.