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Among the necessary on-site optimization factors, building backlinks (or inbound links) is the most important
thing you can do off-site to improve your search engine rankings.

Now, there are many theories and opinions on how to build backlinks. And there are a few that work; a few that have withstood the "test of time."

Besides gaining natural backlinks from public relations efforts or just being a nationally recognized, public company,
you do need to be actively building backlinks to your website(s).

The good ol' fashioned "backlink request" is quite effective, but can also be...well, it IS very time-consuming and tedious work (if you would like a further explanation of the system we use for backlink requests, just post a comment and I'll create a quick tutorial for you).

What I want to talk to you about today is something I like to call the "Coffee Filter" Strategy. Now, I'm just going to go ahead and say that I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, and this is also a combination of other strategies I've learned over the years. But, the marketer in me likes to give things cool names like the "Coffee Filter" Strategy.

That being said, this strategy revolves around the idea of "caffeinating" up your existing backlinks (and the backlinks you get from now on). In other words, we're going to build backlinks to our backlinks.

So, why "Coffee Filter?"

As marketers, SEO's, designer's, etc., we are pretty much obsessed with our coffee and/or tea (shout out to Tazo Awake). And, because of that fact, this illustration will be easier for you to understand.

Without the filter, you would end up with a pot full of nasty coffee grounds. However, if you had no coffee grounds, you would just have...well, hot water (and if that's what does it for you, then by all means, be my guest).

But I think the majority of us would agree that we don't want either of the following: 1) a delightful cup of coffee laced with ground coffee beans, or 2) a comfy cup of hot water.

That being said, the filter is what provides us with the opportunity to create better tasting, less-gritty cups of coffee.

Here's a table of how the coffee-making relates to backlinking:

So, simply put, you bookmark, ping, and RSS aggregate (backlink to) the links pointing directly back to your site,
thus "caffeinating" the power of those links. This allows your direct backlinks to act as filter for the thousands of
bookmark and ping-type of links that are indirectly pointing back to your website.

Right about now you may be thinking that I'm full of it and this is a bunch of "hot water."

So, let me give you a quick example of how I used this strategy in "real life" (haha).

Last week I wrote a blog post about creating gold text with Photoshop. I targeted the keyword phrase: "photoshop gold text tutorial" (which has 1,330,000 competing results). After writing the blog post, I created a Squidoo lens that allowed me to put an anchor-text, DoFollow link back to the blog post permalink. I then bookmarked both the blog post permalink and the Squidoo lens. Result? This whole week my post has been on page 1 of Google for my targeted keyword phrase and out of 1,330,000 competing results. It's also brought 107 unique visitors to our blog since last week.

So, I encourage you to at least give this a try, put your own spin on it and find something that works. Test, test, test!

(And use Firefox.)

Talk soon,

Tommy

PS. Amazing bookmarking plug-in to help save you time (AddThis) click here to check it out. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4076