Here are some intersting posts that I found:

1) Want to promote your blog online — here are some really helpful tools!. Highly worth checking out.

2) Another quality post from Stuntdubl.com, this time about gaining trust online. Here are his 12 steps to helping establish trust with your customers.

3) Nice article (by SEOMoz) on social media marketing — even better, nice list of 25 quality social media sites. Check it out here

4) And speaking of lists, here is SEOMoz’s top 50 blogs online. And here is Cartoon Barry’s list.

5) Thinking of videoblogging? Here are the pros and cons.

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More Advanced Link Building Strategies

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

For those of you who read our Advanced Strategies for Building Incoming Links Tutorial (something we highly recommend), here are a few more link building strategies that you can use to help your site get quality back-links:

1. Subitting your site to online directories
2. Buying abandoned web sites
3. Buying Ads in Ezines and Newsletters
4. Purchasing Links
5. Getting Links from .edu and .gov sites
6. The Affiliate Program as Link Magnet

Buying Abandoned Web Sites
It’s been estimated that nearly half of all small businesses started in the U.S. fail within the first four years. In the brick-and-mortar world this means closing up shop and letting someone else use the real estate, but in the online world those failed businesses can hang around on life-support for years waiting for things to improve.  Many such businesses could be ripe for purchase at rock-bottom prices.  Sure, their (lack-of) profit model might not be enticing, but what about the links they’ve already accumulated?  In terms of initial cash outlay it might be a bit more expensive than other link-building
techniques, but when measured in time savings it could be a bargain.

One of the best ways to find those abandoned sites is to do a search in Google for outdated copyrights, such as: "copyright 2003" + your keywords. Nothing says a site has given up trying like a copyright tag at the bottom of each page that’s two or three or more years old. (Hint: to give your customers the impression you’re up-to-date, current, and still in business, keep yours updated.). Obviously, you can also search for copyright 2000, copyright 2001, or any other year that’s not current.

Other good searches to find abandoned or under performing sites that can be purchased for cheap include temporarily down for maintenance or under construction. Just make sure the domain name hasn’t already expired on the site you’re thinking about purchasing. Once a domain expires, Google wipes the slate clean, thereby reducing to zero the value of any incoming links or PageRank the site may have acquired.
 

Purchasing Links
You can boost your link popularity by purchasing links, but you have to be smart about it.  Unless you’re very link-savvy, avoid buying links from traditional link brokers.  Such brokers typically sell links from sites whose topic is unrelated to yours.  These links tend to be placed in a page template which causes you to get a link from every page on that particular site. This is known as a run-of-site link and is an easy way for search engines to tell that the link was purchased.  It’s actually much better to get a single link from the homepage of a site than it is to get 100 links from every single sub-page of a site. To accomplish this, it’s best to contact the owner of the site directly and offer to pay them to put your link on their homepage or, at least, on one of their high-traffic sub-pages. Remember, you’re not just paying for the link popularity; you’re also paying for the traffic the link will send you.

By the way, you’ll usually have to keep those paid links active for at least 3 or 4 months to really see significant improvement.  It can be relatively expensive, since most search engine optimization efforts will take about 6 months before they begin to bear fruit. This is a game for the patient. One potential upside to buying links is that you may be able to offset some of the cost by selling links from your own page once you’ve attained a high enough PageRank.

Don’t pay for any links lower than a PageRank 3. Although lots of little links won’t necessarily hurt you, you can’t expect them to pack enough link-popularity punch to justify paying for them. One PageRank 7 link (especially if it’s on-topic) can be worth hundreds of PageRank 1 or 2 links (possibly more). In other words, links from low PR sites are rarely, if ever, worth purchasing.

Buying Ads in Ezines and NewslettersSee the following tutorials:

• Article Syndication Tutorial
• Ezine and Newsletter Directories

Getting Links from .edu and .gov sites
See the following tutorials:

• The Value of an .edu and .gov link
• Getting .edu and .gov links

The Affiliate Program as Link Magnet
Starting an affiliate program can also be an excellent way to build incoming links.  As you may know, many affiliate programs use special modified URLs to track which affiliate is responsible for which sales. For example, Amazon has an enormous number of affiliates linking to them with links that look like: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=ASIN/123456789.  Obviously, each is an incoming link to Amazon.  However, in this case, the link is going to a sub-page that Amazon probably doesn’t care about ranking highly. 
To get better mileage from such an incoming link you might consider redirecting the link to pass PageRank and link equity to your site’s homepage by using the 301 redirect and/or a tool like Mod_Rewrite.

Next tutorial:
Previous tutorial: Advanced strategies for building inbound links

• Return to the search engine optimization tutorial page
• Return to the main tutorials page

This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

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Article Syndication

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

While featuring your articles on your site is a great way to attract incoming links, the real value comes when you distribute those articles to other sites in exchange for a link back to your own. There’s a huge thirst for articles out there, and it’s incredibly easy to find sites eager to reprint your original articles. As it turns out, many sites are aware that placing compelling content on their sites is a great way to build incoming links. However, most people still haven’t realized the enormous link-building advantage that comes from having unique content that can be syndicated to all those other sites in exchange for a link back.

Reciprical links and article syndication

In our Reciprical Links Tutorial we discussed techniques for finding sites that would make good reciprocal link partners.  However, as we have mentioned before reciprocal links are second class links and that the real link building benefit came from getting one-way links that don’t require a link back.  Well, given that is the case, it makes much more sense to swap an article for a link, then a link for a link. In other words, if you have original articles and content to offer, you can contact every site on your list of potential reciprocal link partners and, instead of begging for reciprocal links, offer them the opportunity to reprint one of your articles on their site in exchange for a link back to your site. Your link will typically be placed in the author bio or signature at the bottom of the article. Bear in mind that these articles are not sales letters. They’re informative content. Trying to sell too hard without providing anything of real value will just turn people off.

Other authors
Another great way to locate sites that are interested in reprinting your articles is to find authors within your industry who are currently syndicating their articles on other sites. Once you’ve found an author, searching for that author’s name is likely to reveal where else their articles are being reprinted. This will give you a quick-list of sites to contact to get your own articles reprinted.

Dealing with duplicate content issues
While syndicating your articles to other sites is a great way to build links, it’s possible for problems to arise if you’re also planning to feature those same articles on your own site. Often, if multiple pages feature the same content, search engines will attempt to show only one of those pages for a given keyword search.  It can be difficult to control who a search engine considers the original source for an article. Usually, it’s the page where the article was first indexed by Google, but not always. Sometimes it’s the page with the most incoming links. Other times we are at a loss to explain why Google is showing one site’s version of an article but not another’s. 

One solution to this problem is that you can let a site republish only part of an article, rather than the whole piece. That makes your version look unique to the search engines and reduces the chance of a duplicate content penalty. In addition, it lends itself to making your site the more valuable source to readers, since you’re the one with the complete version.

Make sure you get your link
Be sure to require that anyone who republishes your articles provides a ‘republished with permission of …’ tag-line along with copyright info and a link back to your site.  And be prepared to monitor these sites to ensure that they’re doing as you request. It’s also a good idea to periodically search for unique phrases within each article to locate unauthorized reprints within the search results.  By the way, Google Alerts works well in that regard, as does Copyscape.

Of course, if someone steals your copyrighted content, you can file a DMCA complaint on them and get them removed from the major search engines.

Article Directories
Not surprisingly, there’s a fast, easy way to go about getting your articles out there, and a slower, more methodical way of doing it. The fast way will get you lots of links in a hurry, but they’re more likely to be low quality links that will provide less of a search engine benefit—in some cases they may even hurt your efforts to improve your search rank.  On the other hand, the methodical way requires a deep understanding of your industry, learning who the key players are, and developing relationships with them that will get your articles placed on their sites.  Getting your articles on the right sites gives you the credibility and perception of expertise that you can’t otherwise get through placing your articles on lots of low-quality sites.

However, the methodical approach can also be time consuming and challenging. Sometimes you just want lots of links, and quick. If so, article directories are for you. Probably the best article directory to get started with is Ezine Articles. This site allows you to submit up to 10 articles for free, after which there is a small charge for each additional article you submit (if your articles are especially good, you may qualify for Expert Author status, where you’ll be allowed to continue submitting articles for free). Ezine Articles may then syndicate these articles out to other sites. This means you get one link from the article directory, and you can expect to pick up additional links if your article gets syndicated.

There are literally hundreds of article directories you can submit to, but it’s best just to limit your submissions to the top 5 - 10 directories. Here’s why.  If all your links are coming from article directories only, they’ll look a bit contrived to search engines. Therefore, we advise you to limit your links from article directories to less than 10% of your overall linking mix.

Here’s a list of some of the top article directories that accept submissions:

• Ezine Articles (http://ezinearticles.com)
• GoArticles (www.goarticles.com)
• Article Dashboard (www.articledashboard.com)
• Article Finders (www.articlefinders.com)
• Article City (www.articlecity.com)
• Idea Marketers (www.ideamarketers.com)
• Article Alley (www.articlealley.com)
• Article Depot (www.articledepot.co.uk)
• ArticlesOn (www.articleson.com/)
• Amazines (www.amazines.com)

Articles submitted to article directories should be fairly short (about 600 words or so). It also helps if they’re presented in a way that makes them easy or entertaining to read. Good titles might look like, “10 Steps to …” or “The Top Ten Ways You Can…” or “The 7 Most Common Mistakes That …”. People love to read lists. It breaks the information up into easily digestible pieces. By the way, the title is often the most important part of getting an article syndicated. Beyond the eye-catching title, articles about interesting topics or controversial stances on conventional topics are more likely to get read and syndicated out to other sites. Having a good writer on staff can really help in that regard.

Avoid Spreading Your Articles Too Thin
One problem with syndicating your articles out to lots of sites and directories is that you may find it harder to get them printed on the more important sites. Typically, the sites with higher traffic are considered more authoritative than others and, ideally, that’s precisely where you want your articles to appear. However, you may find that such sites are only interested in exclusive content that hasn’t been previously featured elsewhere. Usually, an agreement can be worked out where such sites receive exclusive rights for the first month or so that your article is online. After that, you can shop it around to directories and other sites. This strategy can give you the best of both worlds.

Next tutorial:
Previous tutorial:

• Return to the search engine optimization tutorial page
• Return to the main tutorials page

This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

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Link Evaluation – Determining the Quality of a Link

One of the great bedrocks (if not the great bedrock) of search engine optimization is attracting inbound links. However, not all links are created equal.  Some links can be particularly beneficial to your rankings in the search engines, others hurt your efforts and still others have little to no effect one way or the other.  Given the tremendous importance of incoming links to your site rankings (not to mention the amount of time and effort that goes into attracting these inbound links) it is clearly important to know what kind of links you should spend your time pursuing and which ones you should avoid.  In other words, you need to learn how to evaluate the quality of a link so that you can make sure that you maximize the effectiveness of your link building campaign.

The basic qualities of a good link

There are, in essence, six aspects of a link that are worth noting when you research potential link partners. They are:

1. Your Link Neighborhood.
2. The amount of traffic the page that links to you receives.
3. The location of the link on the page that links to you.
4. The number of links on the page that links to you
5. The accessibility of the page that links to you to the search engines.
6. The link neighborhood of the page that links to you.
    

To learn more about how to evaluate the quality of a link, visit the appropriate tutorial.

Return to the search engine optimization tutorial page
Return to the main tutorials page

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