Matt Cutts, the head of “web spam” at Google, says that you should focus on creating great content, and that people will naturally link to your website over time, which will eventually help your search engine rankings. That’s nice, and I would like to believe him, but there is a mountain of data compiled by SEO experts that suggest otherwise. Off-page SEO – the solicited acquisition of links pointing back to your website – still works and is big business. There are ways to not only increase your link-ability, but to increase your online influence by leveraging major social networks.

Acquiring links can be the most time-consuming part of a search engine optimization campaign. Have you ever performed a whois to obtain email addresses and telephone numbers of webmasters within your niche? People use this service to ask for links and to offer to buy and sell links all the time. But there are more creative and less intrusive ways to connect with webmasters in your niche than emailing and cold-calling. Why not ask the same individuals to befriend you on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or even Myspace? It is a much more casual approach, and your conversion rate for making a virtual friend is fairly high – somewhere around 50%.

Please, do not take this as an instruction to spam social networks. Nobody likes spam or spammers, especially webmasters. We are capable of sniffing out spam faster than anyone. Rather, feel welcome to use these free social networking services to get your foot in the door and establish real dialog way before talking about links. You might get one without even asking. Treat the social network profile the same way you would treat a person, because every profile portal has a person behind it.

You may not be able to convince online A-listers to make friends with you on Facebook (Facebook is for “real” friends); for that, I recommend Twitter and Linkedin. But you may be able to hit the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook with middle and minor online players. That’s  great.

There are a couple approaches to targeting friends. You can target niche-oriented group members on Facebook, Myspace and Linkedin. On Twitter you can target followers of something or someone similar to yourself or search the “tweet stream.” Conversely, you can simply invite your email contact list gathered from the whois service using the social network email contact importer – each major social network makes sending email invitations easy, and without raising spam flags. Don’t spam! Make friends!

Once you’ve made a connection, the first communication is important. You might compliment their website – make it specific. Don’t say “I like your website.” Don’t sell anything. Don’t push anything. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Is that how you would treat your friends? In fact, if you really can’t say something genuine, don’t say anything at all. You might try letting your friends get to know you by being yourself (making status updates, posting links, etc – this is how we actively “be ourselves” online – ha). And over the course of your virtual friendship, you might eventually suggest a page or ask for a link or link exchange.

Matt Cutts, as idealistic as he can be about natural linking, is right in that you should produce quality, presentable, relevant content if you hope to convert visitor or friend to a backlink. Here’s a tangential thought on natural linking though. Of those who search for content online, how many are webmasters? Let’s say 1/100 – that sounds reasonable. And let’s guestimate that 1/100 of those have a website complimentary to yours. OK, 1/10,000 of your inbound traffic from search engines has the potential to provide a backlink. In a nice world, of those 1/100 are going to provide you with a backlink. Huh? So that means 1/1,000,000 visits will result in a backlink if you take the Cutts approach. Let’s apply a correction factor though. Let’s assume that a keyword search negates the idea that 1/100 webmasters have a site in your niche. So that boosts your linking probability to 1 link per 10,000 visits. Mr. Cutts, no thank you. I’d rather rank.

Fortunately, as outlined above, social networks provide a way to connect with other webmasters in your niche. Convert them at a 1% rate and you’ll end up with quite a few backlinks.