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Forum & Community Links

Posted by Lord Ian at 11:29 PM

SECTION XIV

Web forums and groups are the modern incarnation of the old bulletin board and Usenet systems. If there is a topic, hobby, interest or niche you can think of; there’s a forum (or 5,276) on the subject. Forums for your niche are great places to build your reputation and image as well as get links. They’re also a prime resource for finding content in the form of questions and topics to answer or discuss on your own site.

Some forums will allow you to include a link in your profile or your signature, but these are often ‘nofollowed’ or use a redirect (meaning the engines won’t count the links). Even if you’re not allowed to include links, it’s often worthwhile to mention URLs without hyperlinking them. Even if you don’t get credit for the link, people who like what you have to say may visit and link to you on their own.

This networking aspect of forum communities can be very powerful. As you’ve likely noticed, many effective link building strategies require you to develop and make use of relationships. Forums are where you can build those relationships. As such, you should be true to yourself but always be aware of your brand. In fact, its can be a good idea to use your URL or brand name as your profile name.

Remember, don’t be a shill. You’re trying to build relationships and visibility here. People will be more interested in what you say and do if you’re likeable or at least interesting, preferably both (although controversy can have its own advantages). Don’t be the Amway salesman that people avoid because he’s always trying to push his product on you. Many forums will immediately ban folks who shill for their sites or services.

General Web Forums:

There are thousands of web forums out there. The majority fall into a wide variety of niches that range from semi-broad to, “really, someone’s into that?” Some of the biggest forums, however, are general topic groups with enormous user bases. There are, without question, many areas on each of these where you will find relevant space to participate.

Some of the biggest general forums are:
Boards in the Technology section of Offtopic:

Specific Topic Forums:

Find a few or a few dozen forums in your niche and poke around. One nice thing about topical forums is that you know the readership is interested in your topic and therefore more likely to check out your site. There are far too many to list here, but you can always do a search for forums in your arena (use a search like “Indian Recipes” + forum at Google) or look at the Big-Boards forum directory.

Mega Forums:

There are some sites that are so big and so diverse that they have their own gravitational pull. With millions of users and countless thousands of posts every day, these are the conversation hubs of the internet.
  • Google Groups (formerly Usenet) which has tens of thousands of different groups representing millions of users. There is almost no topic you cannot find on Google Groups. If there is, go ahead and start a new forum on here for it.
  • Craigslist Forums offer extremely active running commentary in 54 forums on each of their sites for every major city in the US (and many around the world). CL forums are extremely conversational and it’s easy to get involved and get to know other users. A great bonus is they’re almost all local, allowing for the possibility of in-person business or social networking as well. This is very good for location-specific businesses such as brick-and-mortar retail or service firms in a particular region.
  • Yahoo! Answers isn’t a forum per se, but you can get on there and market yourself as an expert and a valuable resource in your areas of focus. With over 65 million user-generated answers to over 7 million user-submitted questions, Yahoo! Answers is definitely a good place to strut your stuff and build an image as an authority in your field. Bonus: great answers to interesting questions can gain featured status and/or get reposted by users, which translates into links.
A new question at Yahoo! Answers:

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Article Writing & Submission

Posted by Lord Ian at 11:28 PM

SECTION XIII

There are dozens of sites that exist solely or primarily to host the content of others and many give links back to their content providers. The biggest and most popular sites will accept material on a wide range of subjects and often have a solid reader base.

While this may seem like an easy way to get links, many of these sites get flooded with spam, so be sure to only submit quality, relevant content and check out each site to make sure it’s of a tone and quality appropriate to your brand and your image.

Some of the better sites to submit to include:
The sites listed here tend to be rather reputable and pass good “link juice” to the writers of published articles. They are more selective than many free-for-all directories, but their links are also more valuable.

If you want quick and dirty links from anything-goes sites, Ebizstartups has a huge list of hundreds more article submission sites along with a free tool that allows you to automatically submit an article to a few hundred different sites simultaneously. While very easy, we don’t particularly recommend using these kinds of services as the links (when spiderable) tend to be very low quality.

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Directory Submissions

Posted by Lord Ian at 8:05 PM

Section XII
Inclusion Strategies
Submit Yourself Here
Topic/Industry Specific Directories

Directories are handy because anybody worthy can get into them. Directories are also only marginally useful because anybody can get into them. Since you are somebody, you may as well get yourself in as many directories as you can. They not only provide links (some valuable, some less so) but they increase your online presence.

Inclusion Strategies:

First, be upfront about the type of content you offer. Give an honest, thorough, compelling description of your site: make people want to check you out, but be able to deliver on their expectations. To use the phonebook analogy again, nobody wants to call for pizza and get a mortuary. When submitting to directories, make sure to vary anchor text and try to use your keywords in the description and title fields as naturally as possible.

The more valuable and applicable your site is within its directory category, the more visitors (and potential customers and/or linkers) you’ll receive. Additionally, much like search engines, directories tend to promote the most valuable listings higher on the results pages. You should also try to maintain a relationship with the directory. Update your listing as needed and feel free to e-mail them about getting a better or higher listing (especially if you’ve made major changes or seen a big jump in rankings or traffic).

Submit Yourself Here:

A few of the best directories to target as far as getting valuable links are probably the following:

1.Yahoo! Directory: The Yahoo! Directory is the biggest and oldest directory on the web, and one of the few directories that can send direct traffic. While the $299.00 annual fee may seem steep, a PageRank 8 link is a pretty valuable commodity, especially when it can bring a lot of associated traffic.
2.DMOZ: The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is a free, volunteer-run directory. Google and many other sites pull directory information directly from DMOZ. It’s a Page Rank 8 link and it’s totally free. What are you waiting for?
3.Starting Point: This general directory lists new sites on the same day they’re submitted and users can vote to promote your site. The $99.00 submission fee gets you yet another PageRank 8 link.
4.Business.com: A huge business-related directory. Mostly intended for B2B products and services. PPC sites receive preferential listing, other listings are alphabetic. $199.00 per year for a PR7 link.
5.ExactSeek: This is a relatively large meta tag-based search engine. No specific focus per se, but it is free and PR7. For around $12.00 you can get a featured, top 10 listing for your selected keywords.
6.Best of The Web: One of the oldest web directories around, BoTW provides a solid PR7 link for $69.95/yr or $149.95 one time. Sites are reviewed relatively quickly and listed alphabetically by category.
7.Librarians’ Internet Index: A fairly selective, but free, PR8 directory. They will only include sites with quality, freely available content.
Strongest Links has a complete list of hundreds more web directories you can submit your site to. Keep in mind that PageRank is a very rough approximation of value and, while we mention it as a quick and dirty metric, it’s far from the most important consideration when valuating a link.

SEOmoz on the Yahoo! Directory:
Topic/Industry Specific Directories:

For many content areas there are industry-specific sites and directories you should consider submitting your site to. For example, lawyers may want to join Findlaw and film and television professionals or productions should build profiles at the Internet Movie Database. Do some research to find sites and directories appropriate to your niche.

While we’ll discuss it more in later sections, local organizations and directories such as the Better Business Bureau, Citysearch and local newspaper sites can also be extremely helpful in building powerful links.

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Leveraging Partnership Networks

Posted by Lord Ian at 5:55 PM

SECTION XI
Content Sharing
Revenue and Information Sharing
Cast a Wide Net

This is pretty simple: as with any business relationship, you and your friends or associates can trade or deal in things of value for each other’s mutual benefit. Links, content, traffic and revenue are all things of value, so get creative and start making deals.

Content Sharing:

If you create a great piece of content and let somebody else use it, protocol dictates they have to give you a link crediting you as the original source. If somebody wants to blog about your content, same thing holds true. If you and a partner agree to occasionally mention or share each others’ content, you can not only increase each others’ visibility, but build quite a few reciprocal links.

Keep in mind that you should be careful about who you do this with. If their site is garbage, not only will you have to deal with their sub-par content, but their links will not help you much. Additionally, if you give out lots of links to bad sites, it can hurt the value of your links and your site. You should also request that ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ meta tags be used when your content is published on another site in order to avoid duplicate content issues with the search engines.

Meta robots tags for ‘noindex,’ ‘nofollow’ and various permutations thereof include:






Revenue and Information Sharing:

Much the same as with content, if you partner with someone, you can trade revenue on a project, data or information for links. Anything you have that is of value, whether it be actual money or competitive intelligence, is of value to someone else and worth a link (or several).

Cast a Wide Net:

With any of these partnership tactics you should be careful of drinking too often from the same well. Reciprocal links between you and another site are fine, as long as they don’t appear manipulative to the engines. Search engines view habitual reciprocal links between domains as attempts to spam and less legitimate. As such, do some networking, cast a wide net and partner with lots of different people. It’ll not only benefit your link value and rankings, but your industry profile as well.

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Content Building for Links

Posted by Lord Ian at 6:42 PM

SECTION X
Searching for Content Gaps
Brainstorming Desirable Content
Concepts, Tactics and Styles
Linkbaiting & Viral Media

Okay, okay…you get it: The best way to get good links is to create good content. Enough already! Believe it or not, there is more to this. While good content will tend to get good links, there are strategies you can use to build content specifically designed to get links.

Searching for Content Gaps:

If you’ve followed the advice up to this point, you’ve identified the major players in your niche and you actively participate in forums, groups, posts and blog comments. In all of this research and activity you may start to notice certain trends and questions emerge. If your peers or customers are wondering about a certain topic, wishing for a certain product or tool, or generally speculating about a particular aspect of your industry; they are telling you exactly what kind of content they’d like to read and link to!

If you are astute, clever and quick, you can reap huge rewards by creating content to fill the gaps in what’s currently available. Give the people what they want; it’s really that simple. This doesn’t have to be life changing, industry revolutionizing content. It can be short, it can be humorous, it can be tangential to existing material, it just has to be different from what’s out there at the moment and it has to be something people have indicated they’d like to see. Use the politician’s model: for every one person who takes the time to voice their interest or concern in something, there are 10,000 that feel the same way.

If you see several people discussing how nice it would be if there were a tool that found the number of occurrences of the 20 most frequent keywords on a page, for instance, you could build that tool and watch them flock to your site.

Brainstorming Desirable Content:

All linkworthy content doesn’t have to begin as a eureka! moment gleaned from a stray blog comment. You should regularly sit down and brainstorm content ideas.

Don’t rule anything out in these sessions. Write down every bizarre little whim that comes to mind. While it may seem implausible at first, often you can repurpose or modify the idea into something really great. Let your creative juices flow freely.

Once you’ve squeezed every last drop of creative juice from your brain it’s time to focus, channel and filter everything. Are there ideas that are time-sensitive? What about concepts that can wait for an appropriate bit of news? Which type of content is each idea best suited to: Blog posts, viral marketing, featured articles, tools, press releases? Are you sure? Is there a better way to execute the idea? Would the concept work better for other content you want to cover?

You should look at every idea for both its concept/style (e.g. top ten list, how-to guide, article, tool, etc.) as well as its content/subject matter (e.g. pirates, ninjas, computer viruses, pirate viruses, ninja computers, etc.). These are building blocks, feel free to mix and match.

Concepts, Tactics and Styles:

There are certain concepts that tend to work particularly well for attracting attention and links. As we’ve said, you can plug different content into these style-templates in hundreds of different ways. Some of the most effective and popular concepts for presenting content include:

  • Web Tools: handy applications that perform, streamline or aggregate normally tedious tasks.
  • Widgets: embeddable code or images people can put on their page to calculate or present data (often output from a tool). Browser plugins fall somewhere between tools and widgets.
  • Embedded Content: videos, podcasts, images…any cool, interesting or informative multimedia content on your page can be very popular.
  • Beginner’s Guide to…: This can be serious or tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a popular and easily digested format.
  • How to…: Much like a Beginner’s Guide.
  • Top 10 Ways to…: Actually, lists of any length or manifestation are not only easy to build, but universally popular.
  • Surveys: They’re interactive, they’re anonymous and they give instant feedback for people to comment on. (We suggest Wufoo.com for easy-to-make forms)
  • Polls: Same as surveys. (We suggest Polldaddy.com for free polls)
  • Contests: Everyone loves to win things and/or be recognized as the best. Give away something (anything) or offer an ego-boost to one or more lucky winners and you’ll get attention yourself.
  • Multiple Expert Opinions: Gather a panel of experts and get them to talk about something. If they offer support of conventional wisdom, you’ve provided conclusive proof! If they fly in the face of conventional wisdom, you’ve made the sky fall! If they disagree, the sky might be falling!
  • Interviews: Much in the vein of expert opinions, interviews can be even better if you include them as a video or podcast. Keep in mind that the more well-recognized or famous the participant, the more links you’re likely to receive.
  • Encyclopedia-style Articles: Can’t find any experts? Nobody has a well-defined opinion? Create your own! Become an authoritative source to explain an obscure or confusing topic. Then make a page for it on Wikipedia and link back to yourself.
  • Awards or Recognition: Create a series of awards or superlatives for your field and hand them out. This works best once you have an audience, but everyone will want to receive it and those who win will link back to you to acknowledge the kudos you’ve given them.

Capture of Top 10 Most Popular Stories on Digg – Notice numbered lists at the 2, 4 and 7 spots:

Linkbaiting & Viral Media:

Linkbaiting is the concept of creating content primarily for the purpose of gaining links. This is an incredibly effective link building strategy and is relatively simple in concept, but not always easy in execution.

Large social media and bookmarking portals such as Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, BoingBoing and others are widely read by tech-savvy audiences that tend to be more than willing to give out links to content they find valuable, interesting or amusing (most of the concepts above are usual suspects). Getting your story or tool on the front page of Digg could be worth hundreds of links in just a day or two.

Any potentially viral content (content that makes its way quickly around the web by word of mouth or, more appropriately, word of blog) can make for good linkbait. Due diligence is required to figure out what tends to gain traction at different sites and then designing something you think will be popular with a portal’s readers. Be warned: getting on the front page of these sites can result in thousands of visitors per hour. Make sure your server can handle the load or your visitors will be greeted with various errors instead of your brilliant content.

Rand very succinctly outlined the four stages of a successful linkbait campaign in his article on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog:

Stage 1: Linkbait Launch
The content is released, shared with prominent bloggers, and submitted to portals like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and Netscape.
Stage 2: The Long Tail of Links
If the content gains traction and visibility at widely-read sites, medium and smaller outlets and personal blogs will likely point to it, and RSS feeds of the link and content will spread across the Web.
Stage 3: Residual Traffic and Attention
Even after the initial buzz from your successful linkbait campaign dies down, your site’s traffic may stay on a slight increase due to a “linkbait bump” that keeps users circling back to your site.
Stage 4: Search Engine Rankings
The massive influx of links will cause a direct boost of the link popularity of the content piece, as well as an overall boost in global site popularity—and search engines tend to reward links with rankings.

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Link Building with News, Blogs and Feeds

Posted by Lord Ian at 1:09 AM

SECTION IX
News Link Opportunities
Blog and Feed Directories
Tagging for Del.icio.us and Technorati

News, blog and feed directories, like social media sites, offer good avenues for exposure and a few easy links. This can, on occasion, result in major traffic and lots of valuable links; particularly if you have inspiring content that people want to read and share.

News Link Opportunities:

If you have the time, manpower, writing skills and desire to do so; branding your site as an up-to-date, authoritative news source for your particular niche can have tremendous benefit. News syndication sites such as Google News, Yahoo! News and Topix.net can bring loads of quality traffic and links to sites they consider authoritative enough to pick up for regular syndication.

Even if you don’t qualify as a trusted news source for these news sites, you can still try to get your articles or press releases published on them, and gain all of the link-juice that comes along with it. Submitting articles to sites that are trusted sources for the news feeds could provide an avenue for getting your top-notch pieces picked up. You can also construct press releases for your important ventures and submit them to the online wire services, which the news sites draw from. We’ll talk more about press releases a little later on.

Blog and Feed Directories:

You should always submit your site to all appropriate blog and/or RSS feed directories. At worst, it provides a few benign links and helps people find you more easily. At best, you can get tremendous exposure on popular directories like Technorati, Google Blog Search, and Bloglines. These sites serve as the phonebooks of the blogosphere—make sure you’re listed.

You can find a thorough list of blog and feed directories at TopRank blog.

Tagging for Del.icio.us and Technorati:

Both of these sites are incredibly popular and frequented by the tech savvy audiences that provide links by the truckload. If you aren’t tagging your content for inclusion and searchability at Del.icio.us and Technorati, you could be missing out on some huge link opportunities.

These sites track how many people bookmark (del.icio.us) or blog about your content (Technorati). They’re both organized by tags which are essentially user-defined keywords appropriate to the specific piece of content. By searching for your site, you can see how many people are bookmarking or blogging your content as well as which pieces are getting the most attention.

Tagging—at these sites and many others—allows users to search for categories of interest and find content that creators and users have tagged with relevant keywords. Many plugins exist for most popular blogging software that facilitates automatic tagging in the content generation process. We highly recommend you use one of these automated systems as it’s an incredibly easy process that can make a lot of difference.

Six Apart has a good directory of tagging plugins and tools. Simple searches for tagging plugins for your blog software of choice will also turn up plenty of resources.

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Social Media Link Building

Posted by Lord Ian at 11:58 PM

SECTION VIII
Sites to Target
Linking Methods

Sites where you build a profile, page, comment in forums or otherwise interact in a way that allows for inclusion of information about your site and (more importantly) links to yourself are sprouting up like weeds all over the web. While many of them are completely useless; others can provide good exposure and even the occasional, valuable link.

Sites to Target:

A comprehensive list of the most prominent social media sites, including descriptions and info on how useful they are from a marketing/linking perspective, can be found below. Each link will take you to the article’s analysis of the site. While the actual linking value of most of these is relatively small, there are some, such as Wikipedia, that can be extremely valuable.

  1. Digg
  2. Del.icio.us
  3. Technorati
  4. Squidoo
  5. Netscape
  6. LinkedIn
  7. Newsvine
  8. Wikipedia
  9. Reddit
  10. Ma.gnolia
  11. StumbleUpon
  12. Shoutwire
  13. Facebook
  14. 43 Things
  15. YourElevatorPitch
  16. Flickr
  17. WikiHow
  18. BlueDot
  19. StyleHive
  20. JotSpot
  21. Wetpaint
  22. Shadows
  23. Yahoo! 360
  24. Furl
  25. Ning
  26. Frappr
  27. The Best Stuff In The World
  28. MySpace
  29. Yahoo! Answers
  30. Rdiculous
When built in concert and with style and substance, profile building can work quite well: You can gain lots of relatively neutral links and perhaps a few strong ones by building social media profiles. Be careful with theses sites as it’s very easy to get spammy with your design and linking. It’s important to remember that you’re building a site representative of your brand. It may not be viewed by many people, but those that do should get a favorable impression of your site.
A portion of the Squidoo profile for one of our clients:

Linking Methods:

Social media sites essentially give you the opportunity to link to yourself from outside of your own site. You should always put links to your site in profiles that you build, whether they are business related profiles for you as an individual or profiles for your business itself.

Submitting content from your site to places like Digg or Reddit gives you links on those sites and, if your article becomes popular, can get you hundreds more links as other sites pick up, link to and discuss content they found on Digg. This is often called viral content because once it catches on it can spread to lots of users very quickly.

If you actively comment at sites, you can often include a link in your comment signature. These are usually not tracked by the search engines (except at Flickr) so they don’t give any direct link-love. However, if other users like what you say, they may follow your link and this could result in organic links. Seek out active blog and community discussions where link-dropping in context is permitted.

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The Art & Science of Direct Link Acquisition

Posted by Lord Ian at 11:11 PM

SECTION VII
Asking for Links
Who/How/Where to Ask for Links
Offering Compensation
Targeting Content

Asking for Links:

Asking for links seems like it should be the easiest, most direct way to get them. In fact, it’s often the most difficult and frowned upon. As you can imagine, domains that have the ability to give valuable links are bombarded constantly by pages of widely varying quality begging for links. There are, however, a few ways you can increase your chances of getting a favorable response to your link requests:

As with any human interaction, people are more willing to help out friends than strangers. Spend some time participating in blogs and forums on sites that could help you. Get some visibility and the powers that be will be able to put a face (or at least an avatar) to a name when you send an e-mail pitching your site.

Your ability to become a high-profile participant on a site has something to do with your knowledge of the subject (but the sites you’re targeting should be related to your niche anyway, right?). Much more of it has to do with personal charisma and your ability to market yourself. Unfortunately, that’s something very difficult to teach and it’s definitely beyond the scope of this guide. Without delving too deeply into How to Make Friends and Influence People territory, it’s always advisable when endearing yourself to a web community to project an image of humility, warmth, sharing, curiosity and honest (read: non-commercial) intent. Offer advice where you have it, ask questions where you’re interested and even feel free to make an occasional joke if you’re funny.

Who/How/Where to Ask for Links:

As you surf the web for potential links, you'll often run up against sites where link acquisition can be difficult. If the site doesn't provide a clear path to getting a link, don't be discouraged, there are a variety of tactics you can employ, including:
  • Search for Other Outbound Links
If you can find a page on the site that's linking out to other relevant sites, either as advertising or direct referral, you can generally use that as a good entryway to your link acquisition. When you call or email, mention your interest in being listed on that page along with their other outbound links - you can offer a trade in services, direct payment or pitch the value of your content.
  • Look for an Advertising or Affiliate Page
Any page that lists a contact for advertising or affiliates is ripe for targeting. Be prepared to pay for these types of links, as they are almost always part of a site's monetization strategy.
Blogs are excellent sources for links, and can often be pitched with content (discussed in the next section).
  • Locate a Relevant Email Address
Emails for sales contacts and support are not nearly as helpful as website managers, webmasters, directors of online operations or, in many cases, business owners. You need to find someone who has decision-making authority about the content of the website, which in many cases requires an owner (in the event of a small business) or a manager (in larger companies).
  • When in Doubt, Call a Phone Number
There's no harm in calling whatever phone numbers you can find, asking to be routed to the person who handles website content or website advertising and making your case.
  • Be Friendly, Honorable & Persistent
Many times when making link requests, you'll get initial pushback (from un-returned phone calls and emails to flat-out negative responses). Your best move in these cases is to be as genuine and affable as possible and search for a way for to have the site owners make you an offer.
The practice of finding a link contact can be arduous, but over time, you'll become more and more familiar with the format of websites in your industry. Depending on how valuable or important you consider the link to be, it can be worth a good deal of time and energy to negotiate an acquisition.

Offering Compensation:

Sometimes you may ask for a link and receive a convoluted set of conditions, reciprocations and other such hullabaloo in response. While you may want to go through all of these hoops to get the link, at times it will be easier (once some sort of link has been offered) to simply offer to pay for the link. How much you offer is up to you and should be commensurate with the quality and value of the link. A fair price for a link could be anywhere between $20-150 per month depending on the strength of the site, where they’re linking from, relevance of content, anchor text, etc. Jim Boykin has written a helpful article about link valuation on his blog.

Targeting Content:

Perhaps the most subtle and effective way to “ask” for a link is to create some content on your site that you think would be of interest to the site you want a link from. After all, this is exactly what the search engines consider the intended use for links.

If you write an article, build a tool, make a great design and send an e-mail to the webmaster of the target site essentially saying, “Hey, I recently did a post/built a tool that I thought you might find interesting. If you’d like to check it out, you can find it here. I’d appreciate any feedback you have,” there’s a good chance they’ll look at your content and, if they like it, write about it and link to it. When writing this type of correspondence it helps to be specific, introduce yourself as a reader of their site and contextually relate your content to theirs.

This is especially effective if you can create a piece of content relevant to a recent topic or discussion (either on or offline) in your subject area or a recent article by the individual you’re requesting a link from. It should no longer seem surprising that relevant, topical, quality content is the most effective way to get quality links. Putting it in front of the right eyes just helps the process.

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Competitive Link Research

Posted by Lord Ian at 7:49 PM

SECTION VI
Identifying Primary Competitors
Link Search Methods

We’ve just discussed how to ask the search engines where they think the valuable links are, but now it’s time to find out where your successful competitors are actually getting the links that are putting them at the top of the SERPs.

Identifying Primary Competitors:

As Sun Tzu said so long ago, “Know thy self, know thy enemy.” In order to compete for search results in your niche you need to know a couple of things: 1. Thy Self, i.e. the terms you want to rank for; 2. Thy Enemy, i.e. the sites that are already where you want to be for those search terms.

You should start your link building campaign by sitting down and listing the top 20 or so (do as many as 50 if you want) most competitive search terms and phrases that you want to rank for. You may want to look at tools such as the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool or the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion tool to help you create your list.

Once you have this list, search the terms at Google, Yahoo! and MSN, paying attention to the top 20 results at each. Make note of sites that consistently rank in the top 20 for your terms. Pay extra-special attention to those sites that consistently rank in the top five: they are thy enemy. Now, let’s get to know them…

Link Search Methods:

Keeping with the Sun Tzu theme, let’s say your site is www.suntzu.com and a couple of your Holy Grail search phrases are ‘land war in Asia’ and ‘Chinese general’. Your competitive research has shown that two of your arch nemeses are www.generaltsao.com and www.chairmanmao.com. How will you recruit their forces for your own quest of SERP domination? Gather intelligence on what they’ve got that you want.

First, find out where their links are coming from. You can perform direct link searches at Google, Yahoo! and MSN, although Google is essentially useless because they intentionally give incomplete link data. Yahoo! and MSN tend to list more important links ahead of less valuable ones and, thus, the top 100-200 links are the really powerful ones you want to focus on.

To check direct links for www.generaltsao.com, you would perform the following searches:
  • At Yahoo! Site Explorer: ---------- linkdomain:generaltsao.com
* Shows all links to the domain generaltsao.com
  • At MSN: ------------ linkdomain:generaltsao.com – site:generaltsao.com
* Shows all links to the domain generaltsao.com, excluding links from the site generaltsao.com
  • At Google (pointless): ------------ link:www.generaltsao.com
* Shows a small sample of random links to the page www.generaltsao.com

These searches, Google notwithstanding, will show you all of the inbound links to the site you’re searching for.

On Yahoo!’s standard engine as well as MSN, you can search for keyword-embedded links: those that use particular anchor text in links to your competition. You can run these searches for any or all of your key terms/phrases:
  • At Yahoo!: linkdomain:generaltsao.com “Chinese general” – site:generaltsao.com
  • At MSN: linkdomain:generaltsao.com “land war in Asia” – site:generaltsao.com
* Both searches find all links to the domain generaltsao.com that contain the specified anchor text (site excluded).

Yahoo! and MSN also allow searches for extension-specific links and direct-path-to-inclusion links. The former are links with a specific type of domain extension such as .edu or .gov. The latter are links to pages where you can easily add your site for inclusion in a directory or list of some kind:
  • Y! or MSN: linkdomain:chairmanmao.com site:edu
- (edu can be changed to gov, com, org, net or whatever else you’d like to look for)
  • Y! or MSN: linkdomain:chairmanmao.com “submit site”
- (‘submit site’ could be replaced by several other common “path-to-inclusion” keywords such as ‘directory,’ ‘add url,’ ‘suggest a link,’ or ‘suggest site’)

You can also search for hubs that carry lots of information and links about your area of focus. These sites are often easier to get links from as they already mention several of your competitors. Both Yahoo! and MSN allow multiple-competitor link searches which will identify pages with links to both (or all) of your competitors, but not you:
  • At Yahoo!: linkdomain:generaltsao.com linkdomain:chairmanmao.com
-linkdomain:suntzu.com
  • At MSN: (linkdomain:generaltsao.com linkdomain:chairmanmao.com)
(-linkdomain:suntzu.com)
* Both searches show pages that link to both generaltsao.com AND chairmanmao.com, but NOT suntzu.com

If you’re desperate for something (anything) from Google; you can perform some clever, normal search queries to get an idea of domains linking to your competitors:
  • At Google: generaltsao.com -suntzu -site:generaltsao.com
* Shows pages with the keyword ‘generaltsao.com’ but not ‘suntzu’ excluding pages from the domain generaltsao.com
  • At Google: generaltsao chairmanmao –suntzu
* Shows pages with the keywords ‘generaltsao’ and/or ‘chairmanmao’ but not ‘suntzu’.
  • At Google: chairmanmao -suntzu -site:chairmanmao.com
* Shows pages with the keyword ‘chairmanmao’ but not ‘suntzu’ excluding pages from the domain chairmanmao.com
  • At Google: generaltsao "Chinese general" -suntzu -site:generaltsao.com
* Shows pages with the keywords ‘generaltsao’ and/or ‘Chinese general’ but not ‘suntzu’ excluding pages from the domain genraltsao.com

By applying several of the various link search methods outlined above, you should be able to get a very good idea of your competitors’ in-links and where you’ll need to focus your efforts in order to vie for top rankings in competitive search terms.

Now that you know what links are, why they’re important, how engines use them and how to find good targets for them; it’s time to talk about how to actually get them. The rest of this guide will discuss the various avenues for acquiring links from the sites that will benefit your traffic and rankings.

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Searching the Engines for High-Quality Links

Posted by Lord Ian at 10:33 PM

SECTION V
Using Search Modifiers
Use Tools

Now that you understand the importance of attracting quality links, you’re almost certainly wondering exactly how you’re supposed to find them. Fear not, dear reader. In this section we’ll look at how to identify quality links for acquisition (the process of actually getting those links is covered later on).

The most basic way to find valuable sites is to simply run searches on the major engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask) for the keywords/phrases you’re targeting. The top 50-100 results obviously have some pull when it comes to those terms, making them good candidates for link acquisition. There are, however, many more targeted options for identifying solid links.

Using Search Modifiers:

All of the search engines allow you to perform advanced searches to identify pages where your keywords appear in page elements such as page title, anchor text, URL or body text. Using Google (although you should try these searches at all four major engines), let’s look at how the search results narrow for advanced queries for the term ‘agents of value’:

*Results numbers are only estimates and generally only useful for purposes of comparison.

Using these advanced search modifiers will progressively narrow down the results for your keyword searches, usually identifying pages that are more and more closely related to your topic. However, as the results narrow, the number of truly valuable pages also thins out (i.e. the top one percent of 5,410,000 is 54,100 pages, but the top one percent of 2,410 is only 24 pages). The top 30-50 results in both basic and advanced query searches are usually strong link acquisition targets.

Google results for the search ‘allintitle: "agents of value”’:

Use Tools:

There are a few tools available that speed the link research process. When you have many search phrases you want to target, these tools can save considerable time and effort. They also include links to searches for directories, blogs and sites requesting submissions related to your keywords. We’ll talk more about these kinds of links later, but it’s nice to know you can get the resources from these tools.

a. SoloSEO’s Link Search Tool (soloseo.com/tools/linksearch.html) provides an extensive list of links out to valuable advanced Google queries based on your search terms.
b. We Build Pages’ Search Combination Tool (www.webuildpages.com/search/) provides a more concise list of advanced queries, but allows you to enter multiple keywords at a time and returns results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
c. The SEOmoz Page Strength Tool (www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php) will give you an idea of how popular a page is and, thus, how valuable a link from that page will be. Any link from a page with Page Strength over 1.5 is typically worthwhile.
d. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Tools Page (tools.seobook.com) has a rich set of tools for link research and beyond.

By using these tools and the search methods outlined above, you can begin to compile a list of sites and pages you may want to try and get links from. In order to further refine this list, you’ll also want to know which links are helping your chief competitors rank well for your targeted keywords.

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How Do Search Engines Measure Link Quality?

Posted by Lord Ian at 8:44 PM

SECTION IV
Location of Link on Page
Relevance of Domain & Page
Visible vs. Invisible Links
Indications of Spam or Manipulation

We’ve already spent a good bit of time extolling the virtues of high-quality links. That’s because search engines take great pride in their ability to have literally hundreds of algorithmic components to evaluate link quality. Some of the important factors they consider that we’ve already looked at include:

1. Visibility, Status and Trust of Linking Domain (Time vs. Weekly World News)
2. Semantic Value of Anchor Text (search engine optimization vs. click here)
3. Location of Link in Site Structure (Deep, Natural Links vs. Shallow, Spammy Links)

In addition to these elements there are other advanced factors the engines apply when determining link value:

Location of Link on Page:

Page segmentation visually breaks a page into content blocks and—based on layout convention and actual content—determines whether or not the block contains internal navigation, ads, useful content, etc.

Image source: Microsoft Research via SEOmoz.org

Based on this structural evaluation, links from content areas are considered more valuable than links from other areas of the page. While search engines certainly are not perfect at implementing this metric, the take-away is that it’s better to have links integrated into relevant content (with good anchor text) than to have them stuck in a sidebar list or on the bottom of the page.

Relevance of Domain & Page:

Terms in your page URL and Title tags are extremely valuable when helping search engines determine the nature of your page content. As we discussed earlier, using deep page URLs that describe the page are valuable in this regard (www.seattleboatours.com/articles/holiday_tours.html). Search engines use semantics to determine the likelihood of content relating to search query terms.

For example, a Google search for ‘allintitle: dog & canine’ (which lists all sites with both “dog” and “canine” in the title) yields 80,300 results, whereas ‘allintitle: dog & shovel’ yields only 50 results. Similarly, ‘allinurl: dog & canine’ (which lists all sites with both terms in the actual URL) yields 15,500 results and ‘allinurl: dog & shovel’ yields zero results. While this example is painfully gratuitous, the point is clear: the engines know that if you search for ‘dog’, pages with the word canine in the URL or title are much more likely to be relevant to you than pages with the word shovel. Conversely a page with the term ‘shovel’ featured prominently in the URL may not be as reliable a source for content with the keywords dog and/or canine.

There is a whole science behind semantic indexing, but all you need to know is this: Page domains and titles that offer semantic relevance to your content convey an impression of reliability and relevance. Similarly, links to you from pages with semantically related content and or titles/URLs create consistency and relevance that the engines will reward.

Visible vs. Invisible Links:

All the links in the world won’t do you any good if the search engines cannot see them. Many sites use tactics to prevent the engines from following certain links on their pages in an effort to avoid spam.

Links embedded as java script, tagged with a nofollow command (rel=”nofollow” following the href URL), included on a page with a meta nofollow or blocked by robots.txt may not be visible to the search engines and, accordingly, pass no link value. Before you expend too much time or effort building links on a certain site or page, make sure you will get credit for them from the search engines.

Indications of Spam or Manipulation:

While high-quality, relevant links will get you a healthy bump in search rankings, spammy, manipulative linking tactics are a good way to get your site flagged for deceptive practices. If most of your links are from ads, linkfarms, domains you own or IP addresses suspiciously similar to yours, the engines will take notice.

Cheap link buys, reciprocal links and brokered links aren’t necessarily bad for getting your numbers up; but the engines can easily detect and discount a pattern of low-quality links from irrelevant pages. All of the algorithm technology exists not only to reward all of the great content and links you’ve built, but to recognize the abundance of useless pages on the web as well and keep it from influencing the search engine results pages (SERPS).

This guide does not cover manipulative link practices in depth; rather, we will focus on illuminating tactics that will provide both short and long-term benefits.

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Why Build Links?

Posted by Lord Ian at 10:29 PM

SECTION III
Gaining Direct Traffic
Visibility, Branding & Influence

As we’ve just discussed, many link building efforts in the SEO world are done to improve a site’s search engine rankings: Links as votes, as trust, as rank-building influencers, etc.

Gaining Direct Traffic:

Oddly enough, search engine spiders aren’t the only ones that see links to your site. Web users visiting sites can and (hopefully) do click on those links, generating direct traffic to you. Once again though, it’s worth your while to focus on quality links from relevant pages. How often have you actually clicked on a link you found on an extremely spammy, worthless page? If the original page is garbage, you assume anything it links to is probably garbage as well.

It should come as no shock that humans passively analyze page quality when assessing link value. After all, the search engines ultimately try to algorithmically reproduce the results a human would provide if they had the time to editorially rate every single page in existence.

As such, you will get higher volume and better quality direct traffic from pages that are not only popular and highly trafficked themselves, but relevant to your content.

Visibility, Branding & Influence:

What happens when every time someone looks around online for information about boats, tours or Seattle they see not only links to your site, but comments about you in every prominent blog on the subject? You become an authority in the field. By participating in the community around your niche and building content worthy of links and discussion within said community, you gain visibility, branding and influence.

How you want your image to manifest though is entirely up to you. This is just one more example where quantity may be easy to come by, but quality is what really counts. Do you want to have visibility as that guy who always has useful information, the one everybody should check out if they’re interested in Seattle boat tours? Or do you want to be the Weekly World News of your niche, always complaining of a Loch Ness-like monster in Puget Sound?

As people within (and even outside of) your community begin to recognize and respect your image and your brand, they will reference you and link to you as a resource. Links bring traffic, links bring search results, links bring passion…make your users passionate about your site.

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An Introduction To Link Building

Posted by Lord Ian at 6:05 PM

Section II
Fundamental Properties of a Link

Fundamental Properties of a Link:
If you’re reading this (and you are) then chances are you know what a link is. As such, we’re going to skip the lecture on HTML and the structure of the Internet (it’s a series of tubes). What we will discuss are the important on-page and structural characteristics of links that can help make them most effective: anchor text, link location and link intention.

a. Anchor Text:
Anchor text is the actual text that visitors click on to follow a link. Below are three examples of anchor text for a link to the SEOmoz homepage:

1. For great info about search engine optimization, check out http://www.seomoz.org/.

2. For great info about search engine optimization click here.

3. Here’s a great resource for info about search engine optimization.

Of these examples, both 1 and 3 have distinct advantages over number 2. Number two provides a link (which is good) but it offers absolutely no semantic value. SEOmoz isn’t a respected resource on “click” or “here.” These aren’t keywords or search terms anyone would use to find SEOmoz, therefore there’s no keyword benefit conveyed by this anchor text.

Example 1 does contain SEOmoz’s name (since it’s in the domain name). This helps some, but chances are we wouldn’t need much help if someone were searching for ‘SEOmoz’ directly. Note though that constructing concise, relevant URLs for the pages on your site can help, not only for links of this style, but for keyword relevance in search engine spidering. If an article page has the URL www.seattleboatours.com/article/121.html, it conveys no value about the content of the article, whereas www.seattleboatours.com/articles/holiday-cruises.html provides context and relevance to anyone searching for “holiday boat cruises.”

Example 3 is certainly the best of the three because it not only provides the link but it also offers additional semantic relevance. If the search engines see that a lot of links to SEOmoz use anchor text such as ‘search engine optimization,’ they will quickly recognize that other web pages think SEOmoz is a relevant source for information related to those keywords. Whenever possible, links that carry semantic value (such as example 3) are preferable.

b. URL Location:
URL Location refers to where in a site’s page structure your link is found: shallow or deep. Shallow links are link to your site’s homepage or top-level category pages. Deep links, on the other hand, are links to more specific pages such as individual articles, blog posts, tools or other content.

Deep links are usually the result of people finding your deep page content useful and wanting to share it with their visitors. Search engines like these types of links; they’re natural and often more valid. Shallow links, when too prevalent, tend to look spammy to the engines. If hundreds (or thousands) of sites are linking to you, and more than 80% link exclusively to your homepage, the search engines may cast suspicion on the “validity” of those links. Aggressive link builders would be wise not to abuse homepage-only linking. Keep in mind that this is much more important for larger sites since small sites do not have much inherent depth.

You can check your deep link percentage by visiting Yahoo! and performing a link search. Type in the search as “linkdomain: www.yourhomepage.com” using your homepage URL.

Yahoo! Site Explorer link data for the entire SEOmoz site and homepage only, respectively:
In the screen captures above you’ll see that SEOmoz has 1,640,235 links to the entire site but only 178,801 to the homepage, “www.seomoz.org.” As such, almost 90% of links to SEOmoz are to deep content pages.

Also important is the location of the link on the linking page. Are you being linked to from someone’s homepage, an advertising page or a relevant, high-quality content page? Links from a link directory or advertising pages are often paid, reciprocal or otherwise externally influenced and therefore less legitimate than deep links from within actual content or more specific, topical pages.

Conversely, the more popular, specific and well-linked-to the page is that links out to you, the more valuable that link will be.

c. Link Intention:
What you should always keep in mind when considering the relative search engine value of a given link is: how will the engines view this link’s value to searchers? What is the linking page’s intention?

If it’s a link indicating you as a source or a reference on a particular topic, the value is high. If it’s sending someone to you for more information or to buy something, it could be valuable depending on the needs of the searcher. If it’s one link of many in a directory, it may be helpful (depending on the exclusivity and trust of the directory). If it’s a link influenced by money, relationships or other less trustworthy motivations, search engines will try to find algorithmic ways to prevent it from passing value. That’s not to say it won’t help your ranking now, but over time, engines have gotten better and more efficient at measuring the quality and intention of link patterns.

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Why Search Engines Measure Links?

Posted by Lord Ian at 6:11 PM


PageRank and Links as Votes:

Larry Page and Sergey Brin publicly pioneered the use of link measurement as an indicator of search relevance when they created the Google search engine. The initial idea behind their legendary PageRank system was that a link to a particular page is equivalent to a vote by the linking page for the linked-to page.

As the theory goes, by measuring not only the keyword relevance on a page, but also the number of “votes” it had, you could accurately determine which pages were considered by the web’s users to be most valuable for the given search terms. Furthermore, links from web pages with high PageRank would be more valuable (considered more authoritative and reliable) than links from low PageRank pages.

This initial model, while revolutionary, didn’t consider the quality of on-page content, trust metrics or semantic relationships and was thus extremely vulnerable to manipulation.

SEOmoz homepage with Google Toolbar showing Page Rank 6:

Improvements in Link Quality Scoring:

Over the years all of the major search engines adopted the link-based ranking model with some stylistic variation from engine to engine. The technology, quality and “intelligence” of the various search algorithms continually evolve in an effort to improve the quality of returned search results.

Anchor text is now considered when evaluating the relevance of a given link to the given keywords. If a site about Seattle Boat Tours has lots of links pointing to it with anchor text written as ‘Seattle boat tours’, those links will provide greater value to the link recipient than links with anchor text such as ‘click here’ (at least for searches on “Seattle Boat Tours”). We will discuss anchor text in greater detail in the next section.

Semantic attributes the of on-page text surrounding links is also analyzed. For instance, if a link to Seattle Boat Tours is in the middle of a page about theoretical physics as it relates to the study of Scientology, that link won’t be considered as valuable as the same link with adjacent content about Seattle, tourism, boating, etc.

Seattle.gov tourism page, this would be highly relevant for ‘Seattle Boat Tours’

Search algorithms also consider relationships between linked sites. By analyzing things like IP addresses, reciprocal links and domain registration information, the engines try to determine if the links are valuable organic links, or if they are manipulative, artificial links created solely for ranking purposes.

Links as Quality Control:

By using the methods discussed above to measure link quantity and quality, the search engines create a ranking system that is much harder to manipulate than one based solely upon on-page factors. That is not to say, however, that page structure and actual content are not evaluated. The link-based model simply places more importance on links based upon the theory that only well-designed, content-rich pages will get high-value links from reputable sources.

Trusted Domains:

Link factors such as anchor text, semantic relevance and page relationship certainly matter, but perhaps no factor matters as much as the trustworthiness of the domain providing you with your link. A single link from CNN or The New York Times is worth more “link-juice” than dozens of similar links from no-name blogs and MySpace pages.

Trusted domains have proven over time (ironically, through the acquisition of thousands of trusted links) to be worthwhile and reliable sources of quality information about their given subject matter. As such, when the search engines see that these sites link to you when discussing your area of focus, they pay attention. This tells the engines that a reliable and trusted source thinks you are an expert and you offer content that’s extremely relevant to the topic.

Think about it this way: If the Weekly World News runs the headline ‘Two-headed Dragon Boy Born in New Jersey,’ would you take it seriously? No? What if the same headline was on the cover of Time magazine? In nearly everyone’s mind, the Time link to ‘Two-headed Dragon Boy Born in New Jersey’ is far more valuable and credible than the same story from the Weekly World News.

This is why we don’t go into a state of shock when we see bizarre WWN headlines every week in the grocery checkout line: they’re simply not reliable for anything other than a laugh. In the online world, the search engines use their artificial intelligence algorithms to make similar determinations. Thus, 50 links from Moe-does-Mortgage.com is not nearly as valuable as one link from Bankrate.com or CNN’s money.com.

This is a self-perpetuating process on the web. The more trusted, valuable links your site receives, the more trusted and valuable your site (and the links you give) becomes.

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What is Link Building?

Posted by Lord Ian at 7:31 PM

Link building is one of the first tasks thrust upon marketers new to the web. Among the most time-consuming and frequently frustrating of all Internet marketing obligations, link building is, nonetheless, critical to the success of businesses of all sizes. The goals of link building are centered on improving the visibility, reach & accessibility of web content. Since links are the web's primary system for directing traffic; the marketer's focus must be to improve their ability to drive that traffic – links create credibility, visibility & direction for the www's audience.
This page is intended to serve as a comprehensive guide to link building. The first three sections cover the basic structure and function of links, including why they are important and how they are used by the search engines to establish search rankings. Sections four through six discuss research strategies aimed at helping you determine the most valuable targets for link building in your particular niche or industry. The remaining sections (7-24) provide specific link building strategies you can leverage for your sites(s).
Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to ones own website. This can be done by reciprocal links, being listed in e-zines, newsletters, directories, search engines, etc. Link building is one of the best ways to make your site popular. There are few types of linking one of which is reciprocal links.
Reciprocal links or link exchanges is the process where two webmasters agree to show the other's link on their website. After link building when the number of sites which link to a particular site is known as link popularity which helps in the search engine ranking of a website.

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What is a Virtual Personal Assistant?

Posted by Lord Ian at 7:03 PM

A Virtual Personal Assistant is an entrepreneur who provides professional administrative, technical, or creative (social) assistance to clients from a home office. With a full range of options to choose from, you can customize your remote receptionist service to meet your exact needs. Your calls can be screened, announced and seamlessly connected to you or your employees anywhere. They usually work for other small businesses, brokers and consultancy groups. It is estimated that there are as few as 5,000-8,000 or as many as 35,000 Virtual Assistants worldwide; the profession is growing in centralized economies with "fly-in, fly-out" staffing practices.

Common modes of communication and data delivery include the Internet, e-mail and phonecall conferences, online work spaces, and fax machine. Professionals in this business work on a contractual basis and a long-lasting cooperation is standard. Typically 5 years of administrative experience in an office is expected at such positions as executive assistant, office manager/supervisor, secretary, legal assistant, paralegal, legal secretary, real estate assistant, information technology, et cetera.

In the near future, anyone who lives a connected lifestyle will be able to delegate their everyday tasks to intelligent virtual assistants that will coordinate, execute and simplify users’ lives. We will look back on these days and ask ourselves how we ever got by without our trusted assistants, the same way my kids ask in amazement about how we ever got things done before laptops and the Internet.

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