I was fortunate enough to attend the 2012 Search Engine Strategies Conference last week in Chicago (Twitter: #seschi) and saw several great presentations about link building strategies for 2013. Link building is an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO), and the techniques required to acquire more links from other websites are becoming more and more time consuming. For years SEO’s have tried to find ways to automate and speed up link building by submitting to every Web directory that will give them a link. Google’s Penguin update earlier this year was launched to devalue links from those types of sites and to discourage site owners from pursuing more “black-hat” link building. (more…)