Whether it’s for a job or our own freelance work, getting a recommendation from someone is valuable and can help you nab a gig. Recommendation…

Inbound links increase the value of your website in the eyes of Google and the other search engines. And, they help more people find your website and all you have to offer. Each inbound link is like your website just got another vote of confidence.

So, once the link has been set up, your job is done. Or is it?

Getting links to point to your site is one of the most challenging parts of search engine optimization, but link building doesn’t end once a link has been set up.

In fact, getting that link should only be the first step in a long-term link building strategy.

Do you follow up on links? Let us know.

Let’s talk about this for a minute. Someone received your link request, and went to the trouble of responding. Or, they heard about you, researched you, and maybe even purchased something from you, and then decided to link to you . However it started, he thought it was a good idea to create a link to your site and took the time to make it happen. 

Do you just congratulate yourself and move on? 

No! The person who helped you deserves a little bit more of your time and attention.

Not only should you send them a thank you for the link, you should treat this like the opportunity it really is. By establishing a relationship with them, you could not only boost your search engine rankings, you could be opening the door to rich collaboration and business opportunities.

Consider these nine important questions for sites that already link to you.

1. How popular is their site?

The more popular the site, the more beneficial it can be for you. Start by checking out the number of inbound links the site is getting, they are a good measure of the popularity of the site. Then you can sort in order of priority and start with the most popular.

2. Which of the sites that link to you are bringing you real traffic?

Review your log files or investigate Google Analytics to find out which of your links are actually bringing you traffic. When sites bring you traffic, it can be for a combination of reasons, for example:

- You share the same target market and their visitors are interested in what you provide

- They get high traffic themselves

For whatever reason, getting traffic is only part of what you need. The next part is … 

3. Does the traffic from the sites convert to sales?

As important as it is to get traffic to your site, if none of the visitors DO anything when they arrive, you aren’t really too far ahead. The critical question is ‘does the traffic they bring convert for my benefit?’ Set up Google Analytics to help you find out the answer. And, if you find out that they link to you, they bring you traffic and the traffic they bring converts, then stop reading this article IMMEDIATELY and get in touch with them.

Start by thanking them, and then initiate a dialogue to explore what else you can do together.

4. Have you done them a favor in return?

No? Do so, right away.

Yes? Do so again.

It’s very easy to do a favor for someone and being helpful and willing is a great way to build relationships – and relationships are at the heart of successful link building. It might be as simple as sending them an email thank you and asking them to keep in touch.

5. Do you know how the link got to be there and can you put a name to the person behind the site?

It’s really important to remember that it’s people who make links, not websites. Visualize a network of people linking to you, not just a network of websites linking to you.

Do a bit of research to find out who they are and what they do. What do you have in common? Why did they link to you in the first place? Is there more business you could be doing together? And, as we talked about in question four, what favor could you be doing for them?

6. What social media sites are they active on and have you linked up with them?

With the escalating popularity of social networking, contact through social media is critical today. Because these people have linked to your website, they’re relevant to you – and they bring with them a network of friends and followers who are also likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or whatever, and respond to their posts, re-tweets or comments. Do that and just watch your network – and your inbound links – grow.

7. Can you say at least one thing that is great about their site?

Make sure you do.

Write a complimentary blog post, add a kudos when you re-tweet, make a positive comment, agree with them, elaborate on their ideas. You’ll be getting yourself an even bigger fan.

We all love a bit of flattery and it can be a powerful tool when you are building relationships. Dale Carnegie put it very well when he said, “Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself”.

8. What linking text do they use when they link to you?

The linking text that people use when creating the inbound link to you is very important for your search engine rankings. Therefore, you need to know if they are using a really basic ‘click here’ or if they incorporate more keyword-rich text in the link. If necessary, it is worth the time to make a quick approach to them and suggest they use one of your important keywords or phrases in the linking text. It will strengthen the value of the inbound link for you.

9. Are there any ways you can collaborate, either in content or in business?

If there’s really a good business fit between you and a site that links to you, then they’re likely to respond positively to any business proposition you may make. Time to start brainstorming. Is there more you could be doing to help each other or generate more business?

In summary, don’t view getting an inbound link as the end of the story. If you see links as simply a way to boost your search engine rankings, then you’ll miss out on some tremendous opportunities. 

Instead, remember that link building is really about building relationships with people and generating opportunity. It is about being part of community, providing useful content to your readers and the people who link to you. Who knows where it could all lead you?

What is the most important element of link-building to you? Comment here.

Scott Gerber is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, public speaker and author of Never Get a “Real” Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business and Not Go Broke. The content for this post was sourced from the Young Entrepreneur Council, a group of successful Gen Y business owners. You can submit your questions [...]

Let’s be honest: however content most people are with their jobs, Fortune’s "100 Best Companies to Work For" list can elicit envy.  So LinkedIn and CNNMoney may be onto something, as they’ve partnered to point people who read the list towards individuals who work at the top companies.

This marks the first implementation of LinkedIn’s Company Insider widget, which would be quite significant on its own.  It doesn’t hurt that big names like CNNMoney (which acts as the online home of Fortune) and Fortune are involved, either.

So back to the widget’s function.  In this instance, it’s meant to "[s]how readers the people in their LinkedIn network who are employed by each of FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies," according to a post on the LinkedIn Blog.  It’ll also "[l]ist new hires and job changes at each of the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies."

Finally, if anyone wants to keep an eye on the situation rather than act immediately, there’s a "custom ‘Follow’ button that gives readers more news and information about the company they choose to follow."

This is sure to prove popular with a lot of folks.  No one’s promising that tons of hires will occur as a result, of course – the job market’s still pretty iffy – but some people may benefit from making new contacts.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn and CNNMoney should see a lot more page views.

Let’s face it. It’s cool but tough to be an entrepreneur. Jeffrey Paine previously shared with us that entrepreneurship is not about making money because you can do that better at a job and reach home by 7. He further explained that an entrepreneur is required to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a [...]

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The New York Times published a very interesting (and very long) article over the holiday break that raises a lot of questions about Google and search in general. I’ll let you read the 8-page story yourself if you want all the details, but what it boils down to is that Google doesn’t always point you to the best possible results. 

Do you think Google’s results need improvement? Share your thoughts here.

Some of you probably don’t need an 8-page article to tell you that, but this story in particular paints a picture of a business that goes out of its way to treat customers poorly so that they’ll leave negative comments, which have (in the past) worked to boost its visibility on Google, as the search engine has given more focus to local businesses. It sounds crazy, but it has apparently worked, though since the story brought exposure to it, Google appears to have dropped the rankings in this instance. The point is that there is no telling how widespread this kind of thing is  - not businesses intentionally treating customers poorly for search visibility (though I’m sure this one business isn’t the only one to engage in such behavior), but just Google giving undeserved visibility to businesses that get more bad reviews than good. 

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who was tapped as a source for the NYT piece, provides a great deal of further analysis on Google’s practices here. 

"Having seen the crazy things that Google will rank high over time, it’s easy to become jaded and think ‘that’s the way it is,’ he writes. "Many SEOs I know feel this way and have largely given up assuming anything will change, or that Google will take the SEO view of its ranking problems seriously. Heck, Google still won’t let people look up all the backlinks leading to a site, which might allow outsiders to do a better job helping them police their results."

This is one of the key selling points of Blekko, the new search engine to the party, which both lets people look up said backlinks and relies on community to establish relevancy. See our interview with Blekko co-founder Rich Skrenta here:

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"It’s all stuff that can be dismissed as ‘inside baseball’ and not what typical people care about," Sullivan added. "But typical people do care, do get puzzled…what Google ranks tops can have a terrible impact on real consumers."

This is true to some extent. If Google places the bad results over the good ones (and as Sullivan points out, Bing is no better at this than Google, and Bing provides results for Yahoo now), and consumers are duped into going with those results, it is those consumers who will pay the price. 

Buyer Beware

However, it is ultimately the user’s responsibility to use their own judgment and do their homework before making any decisions or suffer the consequences. As Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine says, " The internet doesn’t nullify the First Law of Commerce: caveat emptor. When I had my now-legendary problems with Dell, I kicked myself for not doing a search of ‘dell sucks’ before buying my computer. That’s my responsibility as a shopper. And, as I pointed out at the time, Google would have given me the information I needed."

There’s something to be said for this kind of consumer investigating. The information is out there. It’s up to you how you go about getting it, which is why social media has become an important go-to channel for trusted results. You can just as easily get poor results from social media, but you define who your friends are and what their opinions mean to you. 

Google and other search engines know this of course. It’s why Bing made a deal for Facebook results. In fact, it’s why Google recently launched a social recommendation engine (Hotpot) directly tied to local listings.

It’s not as if Google isn’t trying to overcome this problem. Google knows it’s not perfect. The problem with that recommendation engine is that it’s not where consumers’ friends already are. That’s why Facebook is such a key component to this whole thing, and that’s why Facebook in turn is a direct competitor to Google and why Google is trying desperately to build consumers’ social graphs on their own properties. 

It’s Ultimately in Users’ Hands

If users want Google to be their way of finding trusted information, it’s in their interest to build their social graphs through Google. For Google’s part, it’s a matter of a. getting customers to realize that, and b. getting users to care that much about Google being the place where they get their info. There are plenty of people out there that would just as soon go elsewhere, and plenty that simply don’t trust Google. 

Neither of these are easy tasks, and this bodes well for Facebook, which continues to get integrated into more of consumers daily habits. 

The trust that comes with social and human curation is important across the entire search board. It applies to shopping. It applies to news. It applies to information in general. As the web continues to grow, so to will the importance of knowing who to trust. That means real relationships (social media), and as far as search is concerned, that means access to those relationships. 

This is why social is critical to Google, and why search will continue to become more important to Facebook. It’s also why Twitter (along with Twitter search) is such an effective news medium.

Do you think social adds relevance? Tell us what you think in the comments.

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New comScore video data is out, and as usual, a few corporations traded places in terms of successfully attracting unique viewers.  The bigger story, though, may be the fact that Hulu showed its users over 1.1 billion ads in October, which is more than twice as many as the number two entity, Tremor Media Video Network.

comScore called the 1.1 billion ads a record, and indeed, they represent an interesting milestone or two.  One possibility is that Hulu cranked up some sort of revenue dial, considering it generated just 794 million ad impressions in September.  That means an increase of 39.8 percent occurred on a month-over-month basis.

Still, at the same time, Hulu also managed to do a much better job of holding users’ attention, since comScore recorded a 27.8 percent month-over-month increase in minutes spent per viewer.

So October was a very good month for Hulu, setting aside the fact that it slipped from ninth place to tenth in the unique viewer rankings.

As for some other changes in those rankings, Viacom moved from seventh place to third, VEVO rose from sixth place to fourth, and Facebook fell from third place to fifth.

Google, meanwhile, remained very much on top, with comScore noting in a statement, "Google Sites had the highest number of viewing sessions, crossing the 2.0 billion mark in October, and average time spent per viewer at 272 minutes, or 4.5 hours."