I just read a series of blog posts at SEOMoz that are essential reading for anyone interested in link building. Here is a link to the last post so far in the series (I don’t know if there will be any more or not) - that page contains links to the other posts in the series. Let me take a moment and tell you why I think these posts are so important.

I’ll start with a question - when you produce content for your site, who do you produce it for? Until today, I would have said that we produce content for our customers - after all, they are the people who we ultimately have to please. And while I think that is still true, I no longer think that it is totally true. There is another group of people who you need to write content for, and they are the Link Masters (Rand Fish at SEOMoz calls them the linkerati, but I like link masters better).

The link masters are the people who control the links, and they often times are not your customers. In other words, they are the masters of the links - they decide who gets them and who doesn’t. Who are these people? Well, it depends, in part, on which industry you are in, but there are some generalities that we can mention. The link masters tend to belong to the following groups (this is, btw, Rand’s list):

• Bloggers
• Forum posters
• Web News Writers
• Content Creators
• Resource Editors
• Social Taggers
• Viral Connectors
• Journalists

This list definitely needs to be expanded upon, and Rand does a good initial job at his post entitled “Identifying the Linkerati” (I suggest you go check it out and then come back here).

The existence of this group of people has serious ramifications for your site in general and your link building goals in particular. It means that you are going to have to broaden the type of content that you write. Some content you will need to write for your customers, while other content you will have to write for the Link Masters. Of cousre, if you can make your content appeal to both groups, that’s great, but that’s not always the case.

This means that not only will you have to figure out who your target audience is in terms of your customers, but you also have to figure out who your target market is in terms of the Link Masters. In other words, it is important that you spend some time figuring out who are the Link Masters in your particular industry. And then, you have to figure out what they want to link to and create it. We’ll discuss those issues in future posts.

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