What link building techniques do you teach to new hires with no SEO experience?

[DanDeceuster]

Right now I train my interns and new hires on 5 techniques:

1. Appropriate blog commenting the right way

2. Saving social bookmarks

3. Submitting a website to a directory

4. Publishing articles with links

5. How to build up, maintain and use a Twitter/Facebook/Digg/StumbleUpon profile for SEO

Are there some other lower level link building tactics you have tried to teach interns or new hires?

[Dan-Petrovic]

1. Understanding business they link build for (CRITICAL!)
2. Search skills (advanced search operators, semantic flow)
3. Use of our internal link management database (recording, categorising and tagging links)
4. Content writing / ordering
5. Establishment of a real internet persona
6. Natural email writing
7. Phone skills

[EGOL]

I think that you will do better hiring English majors who can research and write best-on-the-web quality content then hiring employees who will try to get links into existing content.  If you can get them creating content that attracts links automatically then all of the work that used to be spent on linkbuilding will go straight to content that pulls both links and traffic.

[dunklea]

I guess it depends on your niche. I have three interns working on three separate topics on my site so I haven't been too worried about this. I guess you could keep a master spreadsheet for your interns to reference while their linking building?

[StalkerB]

Raven Tools are definitely worth checking out - http://raventools.com/

Edit - To elaborate you can have several link builders log in and 'claim' a site to work with. It also provides a bunch of useful stats about the value of a link etc and can also allow clients to specify costs for links etc. Try the demo, see what you think

[DanDeceuster]

Andrew, I haven't done this because I worry about having multiple employees and interns roaming around looking for good sites. They will undeoubtedly find the same websites and contact the same people and then we could look like spammers. Is there a safeguard against this so that they all avoid the same sites?

[StalkerB]

First thing that came to my mind was email writing but Andrew's covered that already.

That to me goes hand in hand with link evaluation, deciding what's a good link and why; number of outbound links on a page, using mozRank or Raven tools evaluator to give a quick evaluation as to a page's worth then look at what links are going into that page, context, link location, that kind of thing.

But I guess the stuff you're covering is the very basics and the evaluation a bit more advanced and then how to find those links in the first place to evaluate is the hard part

[dunklea]

This would seem like a no-brainer, but it's not on your list so I would add effective email writing to your list. We all know a good personal email can go a long way toward building a relationship and ultimately, high quality links. If there is a website I am really aiming to earn a link from, I usually don't even ask until the second or third email, and by then I barely even have to ask.