Archive for the ‘Link Building’ Category

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I have survived Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference … albeit on information overload. It isn’t really that there was so much information that it was overwhelming. Taken in small pieces everything is perfectly digestible. It’s when I over fill myself that I waddle away overloaded. All that aside, I have to say that my first day was pretty good. I attended 4 sessions and learned something new from each of them.

Stoney introduced Rob and me to some pretty fun people. Rob asked me how it felt to be going to dinner with 12 guys, and I said: “Popular.” I also felt quite popular with all the rubber necking our Pole Position Marketing team shirts caused. We were quite the collective object of many a heads turning and fingers pointing. You could read people’s lips Check out the cool shirts. I bet next year there will be impersonators.

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Yeah, you heard me… that was a slam on your mamma. But that hardly matters now, let’s talk about reciprocal links. They are not dead. I know it and you know it. But for just a second let’s pretend otherwise.

A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. I had a potential client once tell me that so-and-so-big-name-in-the-SEO-industry told them that reciprocal links were dead. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it here again. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links. It’s all about how you use/implement them that matters. No, reciprocal links are not dead and now I have the proof.

Last year I decided to run my own test so I could refute what I already knew to be true. Yeah, I know, who cares about reciprocal links now, right? The fear tactics have run their course and, frankly, nobody is engaged in old-school mass reciprocal link swapping (for the love of God people, if you’re still doing that, knock it off!) But for the sake of science and posterity, I now, over a year later, present the results of my (almost forgotten) reciprocal link test.

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The Professional’s Guide to Link Building is one of the documents available via SEOmoz’s premium content area. The cost of the individual report is 29.99 or you can subscribe and get access to all their premium content.

If you’re looking for a one-stop resource for all things link building, SEOmoz has put together a fabulous reference document. Starting with the basics, Link Building tells you why to build links, how the search engines analyze links and then takes you through just about every possible source for achieving links for your website. Forums, directories, paid links, site reviews, social media… no avenue is left out.

What makes this guide even more valuable is the list of resources provided for each area mentioned. We are not just told to submit to directories, we’re also given a list of directories from which to start. Same for article submissions, social media sites, etc.. If those lists are not comprehensive enough, links are provided to other resources.

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Link building is the single most important aspect of SEO, and yet it is often the most difficult. It’s also where most people cut corners. One pillar of successful link building is strategic linkbait. “What exactly is linkbait?” you might ask. It’s basically anything that pulls the visitor in and begs to be linked to. “But, isn’t linkbait a shallow trick to get people to your page?” It can be, but that’s not really effective because it won’t sustain traffic or links. Effective linkbait is backed up by good content. Anything can qualify as linkbait: a useful tool, a cool AJAX widget, a great design, a fascinating article, an opinionated blog, a debate, a poll, a contest, a resource, and the list goes on.

However, examples are often far better than explanations, so I put together a list of ten great linkbait ideas in action. They’re listed in order of backlinks to the URL, highest first. (Since this site has a strong SEO & Web Development focus, this list leans heavily towards SEO & Dev tools – after all, I wanted it to be relevant for you. You’ll notice that free tools have a sustainability that other linkbait methods often do not. You can see how many of the tools have HUGE numbers of backlinks. Just something to think about.)

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Link bait and reciprocal linking programs have quite a bit in common. Without disparaging anyone who engages in link baiting strategies I do believe that many forms of link baiting are just a dressed up version of reciprocal links without the reciprocation. Note here that I said, many forms. I don’t mean all link baiting, but I would guess a bigger slice of the link baiting pie holds no more value than the old fashioned reciprocal link schemes.

A brief history of reciprocal linking

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Link Building (also known as Link Development or Traffic Building) is one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization. In fact it has come to hold a greater weight than on-page optimization, especially with Google. It is important to have a multitude of relevant quality links to your site (also known as backlinks).

Here are some lists of directories to get linked from, and link building tools & guides to help you in this process.

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There is a right way and a wrong way to solicit link requests. This is the anatomy of the WRONG way….

Dear Sir,

My name is [name removed] and I invite you to take a short break from your work and visit my new site at http://www.xxxxx.com http://www.xxxxx.in, http://www.xxxxx.com , http://www.xxxxx.com, http://www.xxxxx.com http://www.xxxxx.com/ http://www.xxxxx.com http://www.xxxxx.com

OK, first of all this isn’t a short break. Gaurav wants me to check out not one new site, but eight of them. I don’t think so.

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Just about everybody knows by now that links are an important and effective part of the search engine optimization process. The SEO community is abuzz with blog posts, forum threads and e-books attempting to demystify the link building process. Or at least to provide some general guidance on how to go about getting good quality links.

The process of link building certainly isn’t an easy one. While quantity links certainly can, and do, help a site gain notoriety, it’s quality links that really help things improve in the search engine landscape. As search engines have advanced their technologies to analyze links the process of obtaining them has advanced as well. Gone are the days of using “link monkeys” to perform your link building campaigns. Today’s link building efforts are much more about marketing than they are about process.

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In just about any form of marketing, when something works it gets repeated to death until the strategy is no longer effective. Good product tag lines get over used (got milk?, got sand? got Jesus?), TV shows have to get more and more “cutting edge” (NYPD Blue, Family Guy, CSI), and movies have to be bigger and better than their predecessors (Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean). It’s not long until yesterday’s big thing is today’s normal thing.

Online marketing, especially link building, is similar. While there is no replacing the concept of building a good site worthy of links and letting people know about it, there are actually numerous strategies available for attracting good links through solid marketing efforts. In any kind of marketing its good to have multiple strategies, or multiple paths, which one can travel to get to the goal. Putting aside the whole concept of persona marketing which understands that you need to reach different people via different means, it’s a good idea not to put all of your time, money or effort into a single marketing approach. Again, this is especially true with link building.

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So there’s quite the debate about buying and selling links. What I heard from the experts from this session involved positions from more of a neutral perspective. You could tell that some hands were tied, as perhaps some of the panelists didn’t really like the whole idea of buying links, yet they avoided saying anything that would polarize them on the issue. Eric Ward broke it down like this: Are you buying links because you think the search engines will reward you with higher rankings? Or are you buying links because you want to advertise, without any intent on fooling the search engines? If your answer is to the previous, than you are playing with fire. In my opinion buying links for any reason is a short term strategy that will eventually hurt your site, not help it.