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.

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.

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.

• Check for a Blog

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.

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.

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:


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.

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.

a. Anchor Text
b. URL Location
c. Link Intention

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.