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We’re BACK!  It’s busy-busy-busy, over here, but the web won’t wait for anyone, so let’s just get right into it, shall we?  A lot has happened since the last weekly wrap-up, so here’s the best of it:

Google’s Fast Flip – the Jury is out

Jury is out for Google’s new Fast Flip product.  Essentially Google News on crack, Fast Flip features high definition screen shots of news and magazine articles with a handy “flip” feature to scroll through the stories…the front page anyways.  Just a few clicks and you’re directed to the source of the article.  While the product is a fun way to scroll through the news, and has people calling Google an innovator…again;  many agree it’s more of a toy than a useful way to read the news.  Publishers, however, have something to rejoice about from this new product as Google is actually sharing ad revenue with the content developers.  Will it be a success?  Time will tell.  If not, Google can always continue it’s conquest of products that are.

Meanwhile over at Yahoo!…

Continuing to lose ground in the search (and other) markets, Yahoo! will launch a $100M ad campaign starting September 28th in an attempt to regain some of its share.   “It’s Y!ou” is their new slogan, and is a branding effort focused on the recent changes to Yahoo! products that are more customizable and include more comprehensive integration with the social web.  Other tag lines you can expect to see include: “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours”.

Google: No-follow or else!

Mixx.com had reportedly been slapped with a Google penalty for not using the no-follow tag on external links.  This came out after Mixx added the tag to all links including its Popular Stories page much to the objection of the community there.  They’ve since removed the use of no-follow on MOST links from the Popular Stories page, but it’s use is still present even if seemingly random and few and far between.  This isn’t the first time Google has bullied a site into using no-follows on external links (with little to no editorial control) and it probably won’t be the last…

In similar news, Twitter has added the no-follow tag to its “trending topics” links while also adding robots.txt commands to disallow the indexing of most of its subdomains – mainly m.twitter.com which currently does not include use of the no-follow tag on external links.

Seth Godin’s new product ‘Brands In Public’ isn’t well received.

Seth Godin is causing a virtual uproar in the blogosphere with his new service brands in public “the UNOFFICIAL brand discussion” site.  Since Seth announced this new product a few days ago, people have called it everything from slightly shady to brandjacking.  The website acts as a one stop shop for online brand/reputation management and features feeds from a variety of sources covering virtual buzz on a number of popular brands.  The core objection, however, is the fact that (at it’s launch) pages have been pre-populated for a number of well established brands, and are only available to be managed for a fee of $400/month.  Seth promises companies who have these pre-populated pages may opt-out (to have the page removed) for no charge, but many believe that the damage is already done.

UPDATE: Seth announced today he is taking down the pre-populated pages. (all 200 of them)

Beware the twitter worm

A social virus is on the loose and it attacks your twitter account.  The twitter worm reportedly sends you a DM from one of your tweeps with the message: “rofl this you on here:” with a link that redirects you to a “dummy” login page.  Unsuspecting users who enter their information will soon have their account hijacked so the worm can further spread itself among the Tittersphere.  You have been warned.

Unofficial Twitter app store

Via mashable: OneForty.com is a twitter app store that features about 1300 3rd party tools and services along with screenshots, reviews, and the like.  With the continued rising in Twitter’s popularity and hundreds of new 3rd party apps & tools out there, this is a place that brings it all together. If you’re thinking “why didn’t I think of it first?”  right now, you’re not the only one.

The Lighter Side of Social Media

• Ebay GOLD: A man on listed his used car on Ebay for $500, but little did he know that the 1963 LeMans Tempest (a classic car) was worth much more (even in its rusted condition).  The final bid went for over $226,000.
• This is a VERY FUNNY (however inappropriate) video (NSFW…sort of) of a well done -spoof- music video…enjoy.
• Newspaper FAIL:  the editor should have known better than to run these stories in the same issue (let alone the same PAGE).
• And for your “awwwww” cravings here is the saddest dog alive.

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY!!!

SEQFAQ - SEO Frequently Asked Questions

So this is something new here at WDYGU, it’s a series of articles that I’d like to help use as a reference.  Somewhere to tell a current or potential client… “Hey you know what?  I’ve got a perfect place for you to find an answer for that………. my blog!”

I think that I’m going to call it SEOFAQ.  Why?  Because I think I’m witty, that’s why.   Any given day, I might be asked any of a myriad of questions that pertain to SEO.  A great number of these questions can be asked a great number of ways and can be asked a great number of times.  It’s not that I get tired answering them.  Honestly, I really enjoy talking SEO.  Just ask my wife, her friends, my family, or random people I meet on the street.  I’d just like to have somewhere that I can send them to get the rundown without having to hear me speak at length and in semi-pleasing metaphors.

So since this is the first post I think that it’s prudent to begin with the most oft posed question that myself or any SEO firm is asked by a client.  “How long is it going to take me to rank?”

I love this question.  When I’m asked this question I am instantly queued into a number of factors about the person who has posed it.   Firstly, I know that they are interested in SEO, that they have goals in mind, and that they actually need my services.  Secondly, I know that they don’t have enough SEO knowledge to do their business or website any justice.  And lastly, I know that they’re looking to me to help them out.  When this question is posed during a “pitch”, my mouth begins to water as the prospect of the sale.  This is the area where really earn my keep.  As I told Todd the other day, “I could sell a Ketchup Popsicle to a woman wearing white gloves in the middle of August.”  But PLEASE don’t get me wrong here; I’m not Alec Baldwin in “Glengarry Glennross.”  I’m only interested in making the sale if what I’m doing can honestly help me improve a client’s bottom line.

For the rest of this article, I am going to pull a Mr. Rogers here and play pretend.  I’m going to talk directly to you, faithful reader, as if you are my perspective client and I’m shooting straight from the hip.  So here goes.

You’ve asked me ‘how long is it going to take you to rank?’  The answer is that there is no answer.  I don’t know how long it’s going to take you to rank.  I’m not being coy here.

I get it.  You’re looking at potentially spending thousands of dollars a month with me and I can’t tell you how long it will be until you get to where you want.  But let me tell you this.  If you show me an SEO who will give you a concrete time frame, I’ll show you an SEO who is full of shit.  Pardon my French.  But that’s the truth.  I’m speaking from experience here.  I’ve worked with clients targeting GLOBALLY COMPETITIVE phrases and seen No. 1 rankings in less than 8 weeks, and I’ve worked with Mom and Pop local sites in non-competitive industries work for months to show up on the front SERP page.  And the reason for this is the reason that I make a good living… SEO is neither quick nor simple.  It’s a complex process, always evolving with literally hundreds of factors that go in to how you will rank.  But trust me when I tell you that we understand them all.

I’m not going to look you in the face and tell you what you want to hear so you’ll sign on the bottom line.  What does that accomplish?  I get your money for a few months, and then you’re left with a bad taste in your mouth and our brand suffers when we don’t hit a goal that we never should have given you.  That’s not the way that we operate.

But I understand that you want some sort of answer, something to make you feel better about giving me your hard earned money.  I’ll say it this way.  We’ll get you there in the quickest way as is reasonably possible.  We’ll use every single tool in the book.  We’ll take a long hard look at your site and give you the most earnest assessment that we can.  Do you need to change your title tags?  We’ll let you know.  Do you have zero backlinks?  We’ll get you a bunch of good ones.  Can using Social Media work for you?  We’ll give you an honest answer.  We’ll do what it takes to get you to the top of your best phrases in the quickest time possible and we’re going to do it in a way that is going to keep Google happy and greatly piss off your competitors.

We want you to be happy.  If you’re happy, then you’ll stay with us.  What’s more, you’ll tell your friends about us.  Our job is to get you where you want to be, and to do it in a fashion and at a speed that you are happy with.  How long that is going to take is a question that I cannot and will not reasonably answer today.  But if you sign with me, and you stick with us… you’ll get your answer shortly enough.  I’m willing to bet that it’s an answer that’s going to make your wallet fatter.

I love stories like this: A half clueless SEO “accidentally” spams a cnet.com email address with a reciprocal link request and instead they do a feature story about link building INCLUDING a link to the SEO’s client.

Here’s a link to the article: Link Exchanges: The poor man’s SEO

The post starts out explaining why links are important and includes a few good, general pieces of advice from Danny Sullivan.

“if you’re a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion.”

The article later explains how the SEO came to send them the link request:

“…[the email] was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site’s information and offer a link exchange.”

The best part of this whole article is that he actually ended up getting a nice (one way) link from cnet.com for his client after all.  Who knew?

Up ‘till now I haven’t written about a single way to build an actual link.  Mostly I’ve just been preaching about how to build or improve your own website’s content in order to be more attractive to the linkerati and passively build links.  How arrogant of me…

Well, remember link building step one: hire a writer?  If you took my advice, this should keep them busy for a while…

The Basics:

Writing content for other websites in exchange for a link back isn’t a new concept by any means.  It is, however a bit misunderstood, and like all link building tactics: there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it properly.

The three most common methods are: article submissions, press releases & writing guest articles or blog posts.

Article Submission Sites

The Bad: There are literally hundreds of websites that will publish uniquely written articles, and (usually) you’ll get a link back.  On the surface, this sounds like a great way to get hundreds of unique one way backlinks, and it is.  The problem is: because it’s a strategy that’s so over-done, many of these sites no longer pass page rank.  In other words: your link won’t be counted by Google in their ranking algorithm.

The other problem with this method is that many of these sites have become so large, even if your link does pass link juice, it’s not much.  Before long, your article gets buried in the site’s archives as newer articles take its place.  The article itself will get little power from internal links, and thus, it doesn’t pass much to you.

The Good: Are article submission sites worth it as an SEO link building method?  Most of them are not.  Does that mean you shouldn’t do it?  Not quite.  The nice thing about this strategy is: while a website like ezinearticles.com might not pass page rank, it’s still a powerful enough site that your article may actually rank well in search results, giving you potential traffic and exposure.

Doing it better: Some SEO’s use the same list of article submission sites to build links for their clients.  More than likely, these are the sites that have been identified by Google as such and no longer pass link juice.  If you want this method to be a source of links for your SEO campaign, you’ll need to do a little research first.

A big part of doing any kind of link building is list building.  Take the time to find niche authority websites that are relevant to your site or are in parallel industries and that publish articles.  If this is starting to sound more like “guest writing” you’re on the right track.  The difference, here, is you should be looking for websites that your writer can become a regular author of, not just a guest.

Many times, you won’t get links from the articles themselves.  Instead, the articles will link to an “author bio” page that contains your backlinks.  So the more you write the more juice your bio page passes.  Also, beyond the links, this method is a great way to expand your brand and authority as an industry leader.

Press Releases

The Bad: Much like article submission sites, large press release websites (like prweb.com) probably don’t pass page rank.  In fact, the only difference between this strategy and article submissions is that press release sites are restricted to newsworthy content and you probably won’t find many niche PR sites in your industry.

The Good: While this isn’t a great link building strategy in and of itself, online press releases can get you a lot of attention if the news is worth repeating.  It’s a great way to help promote a viral link bait campaign and just generally gain exposure on the web.  Both of which can help you attract links naturally.

Doing it better: Another benefit of this strategy is press release sites get picked up by google news (PR Newswire, Business Wire, Market Wire, and PR Web to name a few).  With google news results popping up in the SERPS, it’s another opportunity for your site to be listed in Google for relevant keywords.

Guest Articles & Guest Blog Posts

The Bad: This isn’t generally a strategy you can just do.  You really need to develop some industry clout or authority as a writer first.  Asking a website owner if you can write a guest post for their blog/site will prove difficult if you don’t have quality samples of your writing to show them.  If it isn’t difficult, the site you’re writing for probably isn’t a place you’d want to get a link from anyways.

The Good: Of the three methods, this can be the best use of your writers’ time in terms of the SEO value of the links.  If you get to plug your company site within the content of the article, sometimes you can even get juicy link text and deep links to target landing pages. (Link GOLD)

Doing it better: Don’t just save the best content for your own website.  Depending on the site you’re writing for, sometimes you can do things with your writing that you can’t do on your company site.  So don’t just take this as an opportunity to plug your services or products.  Write something link-baity…social media worthy…perhaps potentially viral (get permission first before going with the controversial hook).  Casually drop your link(s) in the article, then promote the hell out of it.

A large part of the power a link passes is the value of the page it’s on.  The more sites that link to your guest articles, the more power [the links they contain] will pass on to you.  So while writing link-bait for your own site can attract lots of untargeted backlinks, writing link worthy content for guest articles will draw power to a page on an external site that links to your targeted page(s) with targeted anchortext.  And because anchortext from internal links isn’t as algorithmically weighted as it is for external links, this can actually be a more effective way to do link bait in terms of its SEO value.

If SEO is important to you and you haven’t hired a writer yet, start looking for one.  If you have one and you haven’t utilized their writing skills to promote your website, start today.  Don’t leave opportunities for links or valuable internet exposure on the table.  Because if you do, your competitors might not.

-No, check that. Hire a GREAT writer!

Put aside the importance of great copy for sales, intriguing articles for attracting RSS subscribers, or any number of reasons having a great writer can be helpful to your web site…I’m talking links, here!

How can you expect webmasters to take any link request seriously if the quality of (or lack of) content is…well…lacking? You can’t. Having compelling writing will give webmasters a REASON to link to you (other than the fact that you were polite and said ‘please’). And if you’re not constantly adding quality, useful content to your site, you simply aren’t taking advantage of every opportunity for links.

One of the biggest and most unfortunate misconceptions about SEO is that once you’ve developed a web site, it’s done. The reality is: SEO (and internet marketing as a whole) is a constant process of optimizing and developing fresh new ways to attract users…and of course: links.

What is Link Bait?

Adding content to attract links isn’t a new concept. The term ‘link bait’ has been around for some time and it has become a buzzword that means just that. So what kind of content works best to attract links?

In my last post, I mentioned that building links is like marketing to webmasters. You need to appeal to what we SEO’s call the ‘linkerati’ or the linking web. It’s not that webmasters are much different from your customers, however. They simply have higher standards for what is considered valuable online content. But in order to create successful link bait you first need to understand WHY webmasters link out to begin with.

Understanding Link Bait Hooks.

‘Link Bait Hooks’ are basically the angle your content takes in order to entice webmasters to link back.  Todd Malicoat once did a fantastic post on his blog stuntdubl.com expanding on the various link bait hooks and how they can be used:

Stuntdubl’s list of link bait hooks:

• News hook
• Contrary Hook
• Attack Hook
• Resource Hook
• Humor Hook
• Ego hook
• Incentive hook

The basic point is you need to create content on your web site so useful, informing, or entertaining that other webmasters link to your site as a reference.  Or you can create content targeting webmasters’ emotional senses & needs in order to ‘bait’ them into linking back. It sounds sinister, but it doesn’t have to be.

Todd’s post comes with a harsh disclaimer, however:

…[with linkbaiting] you MUST be remarkable ala Seth Godin’s Purple Cow – if you can’t bait with stuff that people will talk about, then go back to link begging.

BTW: Todd, I still have your copy of that book…

His point being well made: it’s one thing KNOW how to appeal to webmasters, but creating content that gets the job done is quite another task. The word REMARKABLE, being the consistent theme within Purple Cow, is why having a great writer is so important and can make or break your link baiting efforts.

A good writer should be able to write a compelling article on just about any topic you give them, but a great writer knows what topics are most appropriate and how best to leverage the associated ‘hook’ for attention that can attract the best kind of links.  Free links.

Having a great writer isn’t just about adding content to your own site, however.  In my next post, I’ll explore the link building method of ‘article submissions’, why it’s misunderstood, and how to do it better than everyone else.  Don’t miss it!

Getting other webmasters to link to your web site isn’t easy, but if you’re not doing everything you can to make your site attractive to the linking web, you’ll find it downright frustrating.  In marketing, the goal is to make your business attractive to targeted consumers, but for link building, you need to think of it as marketing to webmasters.  And believe me, webmasters are a much more difficult group to impress.

So before you start a long link building campaign, you need to take a good look at your site from a slightly different perspective.  The good news is: most of the same marketing principles apply, but this time, the emphasis becomes: “would I link to this” instead of “would I buy this”.

I broke the checklist down to three major categories:  SEO, Design, and Content.  Using the cliché pyramid diagram concept, SEO is the base.  It’s the strategy, the reason you’re link building in the first place, and foundation for making the most of the links for rankings. Design falls in the middle section.  This covers the subliminal trust cues and little nuances that can either make or break a link deal. Finally, content sits at the tip of this completely unattractive shape.  It’s your hook, or the ‘reason’ webmasters link to your web site.

Below is an outlined checklist of the areas you should re-visit before you begin link building, with a link to the corresponding description.

Click on the topic to see the description below:

SEO

• Keyword research
• Target Page Strategy
• Internal Linking
• On-Page SEO

Design

• Usability/Find-ability
• Compelling design
• Trust Cues

Content

• Link worthy content
• Area for regular content
• Brush up your offering!

SEO – Making the most of your back links for SEO benefit is crucial. Building links to a web site with poorly executed SEO may not only make achieving rankings difficult, it could end up causing more work for you (or your SEO) in the long-run.  Getting this part right from the beginning is (I’ll say it again) crucial.

Keyword research – Choosing the right keywords for your SEO campaign is the very first step and probably the most important.  It’s not always about how often a search phrase is used, however.  What it comes down to, is choosing the phrases consumers are searching for when they’re looking for the specific product or service you offer.

This isn’t only important for your on-page SEO, either.  Keyword rich anchor-text is one of the most important ranking factors for back links.  Trust me: if you take the time to get this part right, you’ll thank yourself later.

Target Page Strategy – Once you have your keywords, you need to lay out how your site is/will be structured in order to target each phrase.  While a single page can rank for multiple keywords, your homepage probably can’t cover them all.  Take your keyword list and create mock site-map with a natural categorical hierarchy that makes sense to your users.  Don’t be afraid to group synonyms on the same page.  Having variations for anchor text is important so make sure you have more than 1 keyword per page, but try and limit it to around 3-4.

Internal Linking – Once you have your page strategy in place, now you need to create a internal link navigation so that users (and search engines) can find these pages.  As a general rule: the more important the keyword phrase, the more internal links you’ll want pointing to that keyword’s page.  In other words: if your homepage targets your top keyword phrases (as it usually should) you will want every page of your site linking back to the homepage.

Internal anchor text (text used as the link) can be important too.  Using targeted keyword phrases to point to the respective page is a good way to tell the search engines what the page is about.  Don’t over-do this, however: use variations!  If every internal link points to a page with the same anchor text as every back link to that page, you’ll ‘over-optimize’ and actually start seeing rankings drop.

On-Page SEO – This is the part where you put keywords in the title tags, meta description, and meta keywords right?  Well, yes…but first, what’s on the page?  If it’s just a picture of your product with the same description that can be found on about 1000 other websites, don’t waste your time.  Unique text is what SEO’s sometimes call “spider food”.  The search engines eat it up; and without it, your page may end up in google’s supplemental results and consequently rank for nothing.

Oh yeah, and having keywords in: the title tag, meta description, meta keywords, image alt text, image title, content, H1, H2, H3, bold, and italicized…may or may not help you.  Consult your SEO.

Design – Is design really important for link building?  Yes.  It is.  It’s not that a poorly designed web site can’t get links; it’s that a site with the right design should project trust and authority and simply be MORE LIKELY to get that link.  Remember, we’re marketing to webmasters, here.  They can be picky about small design features like target=“_blank”, for example.  I’ve actually lost a link because a client used target=“_blank” for all external links.  On the other side of the coin, however, I’ve seen plenty of links purely on the basis of a great design.  So: Yes, it’s very important.

Usability/Find-ability – I love the word find-ability.  I believe it should be the goal of any webmaster to have users find what their looking for on their web site.  So while most web savvy people may be smart enough to figure out your complicated navigation, if at any point they become frustrated, they’ll leave quicker than you can say “heat map testing”.  Consequently, this will lose you both customers AND links.  Usability testing is so important yet so largely ignored…and I bet most people don’t know it could help them build more links!

Compelling design – Whenever I see the default version of the wordpress theme, I instinctively hit the back button.  You lost me.  It’s not that it’s ugly, or wrong.  It just tells me that you took as little time with the design of your site as you could, and your content probably reflects that.  You don’t have to spend ten thousand dollars developing a website to attract links; but the design is your face, and a beautiful clean design is much more attractive to the linking web than that free-css-template you just downloaded.

Trust Cues – This is a phrase I like to use when describing why design and usability are important for attracting links, but there’s more you can do; and not do for that matter.  Adding awards, certifications, trusted affiliations, and recommendations will add to the trust and authority that your site projects.  Adding these trust cues will not only improve your conversion rate, but it will also (say it with me!) help attract more links.

What not to do?  You will detract from your site’s trust by adding too much advertising or simply trying to be too forceful with your call to action.  Not every sentence needs to be a sales pitch.  Keep information: information, and sales copy: sales copy.

Content – The real trick to attracting links comes down to what’s on your site.  What are you offering that’s so worthy of having other webmasters willingly link to you?  What are you doing to improve and add to it?  The bottom line: you need to have something to offer webmasters or they’re probably not going to give you that link you asked for.

Link worthy content – I mentioned hooks before, and it’s a very good way to describe the “angle” of your content (call it link bait).  Do you provide information?  News? Resources?  Entertainment?  A new perspective?  Or were you thinking people would just willingly link to your e-commerce store?

More important than the hook type, however, is the quality of your content.  Paying $5 per article from someone who speaks English as a second language probably isn’t going to do much for attracting links.  Your content needs to be remarkable.  Not just good.  Remarkable.

Area for regular content – Yes, a blog will do nicely.  It doesn’t necessarily NEED to be a “blog” but you get the idea.  If you don’t have a section on your site that’s dedicated to both reaching out to new and regular users & adding fresh and new link worthy content, add one today!  You can have a working wordpress blog running in less than 5 minutes, so you have no excuse.

Brush up your offering! – How does an SEO tell their client or manager, the product or service, (or even the price) you offer is hurting their rankings?  How dare they!  Webmasters are a smart bunch and I have a great story about how this is actually possible:

A link ninja once came into my office and said,

“Todd, we have a small problem.  I asked this guy for a link and he did it, but meanwhile he sorta trashed the company…”

When I went to the page, it seems he had done some price comparison and found that our client had such bad prices, it made sense to him to do a bash post on his blog about it.  We got the link, but also created an ORM problem (to no fault of the link ninja) for the client.  So while this specific instance didn’t ‘hurt’ their SEO, you can imagine how many links it potentially lost them.  Since then, the client updated their service and prices to compete with the current market, and the links started to come much easier…go figure.

If you liked this article, subscribe to our RSS feed.  Next week I’ll be getting into some more specific ways to target your content for links.

I know I’m breaking a cardinal rule of lists, here (you’re supposed have more bullets then the last one of it’s kind),  but I don’t think I can take another 101…301…1001+ ways to build links articles.  No matter what, there always seems to be a duplicate and it usually goes something like this:

#11 Get links from Social Media Profiles
…
#66 Get a link from your LinkedIn profile.

Isn’t that the same thing?  In fact, if your list is more than 3 (that’s right: 3) you sir, have too many.

Let me back up for a second.  It’s not that a long list of social media sites that provide ‘do-follow’ links isn’t helpful.  But if that’s the way you look at link building, you might be missing the point of why links matter in the first place.

So instead, I’d like to talk about just three (very general) strategies that you can utilize to build links to your site.  They are:

• soliciting for links
• adding your links to online editable content
• developing (your own) content for links.

First up: Soliciting for Links!

I’ve spent the better part of the past three years contacting webmasters for links to client sites.  The only thing I can say for sure about it is: It sucks!  It’s hard, tedious work.  And while sometimes rewarding, it can be extremely frustrating, ESPECIALLY if the client’s site isn’t… well…ready.

Some different types of link solicitations include: networking for links, directory submissions, article submissions, link trading, begging, bartering, and yes: paying for links (tsk, tsk).  It’s almost as boring to talk about as it is to do, so the only advice I’ll give on this type of link building  is this: Listen to webmasters who say “no”.  More often than not, if someone refuses your link request, there’s a reason.  It’s also likely that same reason might be why a potential customer won’t buy from you.  So consider fixing it.

Next up: Editing pages for links.

This is probably the most misunderstood method of link building.  It’s generally done one of two ways: either by adding your link to an existing page, or creating a new page and adding your link there.  This usually includes a healthy dose of: blog commenting, wiki editing, social media links, links from profile pages, and placing links in forums.  A good 90% (if not more) of these links carry the dreaded “no-follow” tag (meaning they don’t count as a vote in Google’s eyes).  But in all honesty, this type of link building isn’t going to get you much traction in the SERPS even if you find every do-follow blog/wiki/forum on the internet.  That’s not to say it DOESN’T work, but sending a computer to spam blog comments is not a serious link building strategy. (thus: “crap hat”)

So why did it even make the list?  Because dropping links this way can be integral when used in conjunction with the other two link building strategies.

Here’s an example: You’ve developed a blog and you desperately need to get links to it.  Go out and find similar blogs and start commenting on their posts and joining in on the conversation (quick tip: make REAL comments).  Be sure to include a link back to your blog in the comment (even if it’s no-followed).  Sooner or later, some bloggers will notice you and start reading your blog and commenting there too.  If they like what they read, before you know it, they’ll start linking to you!  If not, don’t be afraid to send a polite e-mail asking for a link. (once you’ve developed some trust..)

And that brings us to the third and final method: content development

It’s unfortunate that this tends to be the most ignored method for building links, because I believe it’s the most important.  Why?  Because it’s the way google want’s you to build links.  But it isn’t easy, and it starts and ends with the content of your web site.

So how does one go about “building” links simply by changing the content of their site?  The term “link-bait” usually comes up in this conversation but this only covers part of the strategy.  Put simply, it refers to the addition of content specifically designed to attract backlinks.  But there’s more to it than just that.

What it sometimes comes down to is simple: Is your site ready for link building?  If not, you may find that your link-bait isn’t attracting any links.  Remember those “reasons for the no’s” I talked about?  Fix them.  Haven’t started link building?  Do some usability testing and ask for qualitative opinions from your testers.  You can’t make all the people happy all the time, but if 9 of 10 thought a design feature detracts from your credibility, you’ll be losing links AND customers.

So once your site is “ready” now what?  Developing useful, resourceful, and otherwise interesting content can (and will) attract natural backlinks.  What makes this part hard is the content must be WORTHY of links.  Your every day top 10 list (or top 3) article just won’t cut it…give your users something they can USE and you’ll not only get links from it, but you’ll convert users to customers as well.

And really: this is how Google intended for links to determine rankings.  That’s why my next series of posts are going to be dedicated to content strategies that work for building quality backlinks that Google WANTS you to build.

So subscribe to our RSS Feed, there’s a lot to cover!

Welcome to our website and blog! We are officially open for business and ready to take on the world of SEO and Social Media!

For those of you who don’t know us, we are two former link ninjas & SEO specialists: Todd Heim and Shawn Rosko. We’d worked at WeBuildPages with Jim Boykin for about 3 years a piece; and now (after a brief 3 month hiatus) we’re ready to start taking on clients of our own.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: “Yet another WBP ’spin-off’ company. And this time the name is even cheesier than the original!” And, yes, we have a LOT to live up to. Being in the company of: Todd Malicoat (aka Stuntdubl), Rhea Drysdale & Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media, Christina Gleason (fka QualityGal), Patrick Sexton, and Justilien Gaspard leaves very little room for error. But we’re up to the challenge!

We’ve been honing our skills for the past 3 months and have some very interesting new linking strategies that are already showing promise. Shawn, meanwhile has been killing it on social media. His brand new blog will probably see around 100k visitors this month while he networks in the social arenas.

There’s so much we want to share, and this blog will be our portal! Make sure you stay tuned (that means subscribe to our RSS feed)…2009 is going to be a very good year!