Do a quick Google search for the V7N SEO contest keyword. You'll see all sorts of Nick Wilson-esque link baiting techniques at work, none more catchy than the sites with the ad misericordiam charity hook. I mean come on, how many golden hearted SEOs can there be in this world? If there’s one thing I’ve learned about charity (I live in the third world so I know), it’s that true good samaritans give even when nobody’s watching. It shouldn’t take a $7,000 SEO contest for you to realize you’re the next Mother Teresa. If you’re really serious, donate 5% of your earnings for all succeeding SEO projects. That might prove to be more beneficial down the road, rather than just paying $7,000 once. If you’re looking for more charity link building tips, there’s this article by Aaron Wall.

So before another SEO decides to donate yet again his top prize to charity, here are a few alternative link building tips to help your V7ndotcom Elursrebmem site. In the first installment of this 3-part series, we discuss link building and WordPress themes.

Link Building via WordPress Themes

WordPress is the blog software. The link building potential of WordPress themes is enormous. If implemented correctly, you stand to get links with varied anchor text from aged, possibly authority sites.

Benefit 1: Natural Anchor Text

Create multiple theme variants (1 column, 2 column, 3 column) for multiple WP versions (1.0+, 1.5+, 2.0) making sure you name each theme with variations of your main “V7ndotcom Elursrebmem” anchor text, e.g. V7ndotcom Elursrebmem New York Hotel or Abstract V7ndotcom Cialis Elursrebmem :)

Try to seed the theme with backlinks to your contest page. Add links in the Meta section of the sidebar or via the traditional footer element:

SEOPhilippines.org uses the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem theme by Marc Macalua

You might also want to move the element around a bit. You know how Google likes to devalue links found in the “usual” places.

Benefit 2: Natural One-Way Links from Aged, Authority Sites with Mixed PR and IP Profiles

With WP sites being hosted all over the world, your “theme homepage” will get links from different Class C IP blocks, which can only help add a touch of natural to your links.

Should your theme variants get the attention of the older WP 1.0+ and 1.5+ crowd, you get the benefit of having backlinks from aged domains. Now some of these blogs are considered authority sites by Google. If you can convice the owner to switch themes, you’re instantly A-listed, all the time, from hundreds, if not thousands of PR rich, all original pages which can also provide nice referral traffic. Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.org has written about this phenomenon before. To help jumpstart your link building campaign, consider submitting your new theme/s to the different theme aggregators out there and get instant clean, one-way links.

Now I’m not sure if Matt (the one from WP not Inigo) will allow this but there’s really a shortage of nice WP 2.0 themes. If you can fill the theme needs of WP users, you probably won’t have a hard time convincing bloggers to keep that footer element on their blogs.

NOTE: You can also create plugins instead of themes but you’ll probably get less links. You can also use this technique for other SEO projects. This is where SEOs with CSS design backgrounds can make it big.