Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

I thought for this week I’d give a summary of some of the more interesting Search Engine Strategies sessions which are currently going on in New York City.

I was at SES as a speaker last year in New York and I have to say, there is a wealth of information there even if some of it is contradictory.  Not only that ,but you get to meet some amazing people and can even have one on one access with some of the search engine reps.  Overall, I found it to be a worthwhile experience.

This year, like many people, I wasn’t able to attend. However, I wanted to keep up with the news, so I found a great source of reports and updates.  I will summarize the most important sessions to the best of my ability.

One of the best ways to promote your site is to generate buzz that gets carried offline.

One way to do that is to ensure others know what you are doing but sometimes this can be difficult especially in today’s fiercely competitive online market.

There are areas of the web which are geared towards helping some of those sites and if your site is a technology or tech related site then this article is for you.

Google has had a feature out for some time which allows webmasters to create a sitemap file to help Google’s crawlers find and index content.

It sounds like a great idea.  After all, it is much easier to feed the crawler the content then hope it finds it on it’s own.

But is a Google sitemap worthwhile?  Is it even necessary?  Well, once you realize the incredibly powerful statistics available to you, you might change your opinion.  After all, would knowing what terms might be driving searches to your competitors be helpful?

I stumbled across this quite by accident.  I knew it was there because I’d seen it before but I forgot about it until today.

So I did some checking to see if it still does work and based on my limited test it appears that it does.

What I’m about to explain to you may not only help get sandboxed sites indexed and ranking quicker, it can even make the site owner a little money.

Now that MSN search has changed its look and search results I thought I’d do a little digging into the new look to see what I could come up with.

Overall I am impressed with the new look even if the current results aren’t that spectacular.

But is the new MSN really that much better?

Jill Whalen wrote an excellent article today. It was titled “Buying Text Links - Is It Evil?”.  http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2959

She makes a lot of excellent points about how search engines handle “text link ads”.

One of the statements that stood out the most to me was:

The good news for search engines (and I guess the bad news for link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them tend to leave noticeable “footprints” behind in the code.

My thoughts on that......IF YOUR BUYING LINKS FOR THE SAKE OF BUILDING LINK POPULARITY YOU SHOULD STAY AWAY FROM LINK BROKERS/BUILDERS WHO ONLY USE AUTOMATED TECHNOLOGIES TO FEED LINKS ON EASY TO SPOT LINK NETWORKS!!!

Placing links without a network signature should be one of the primary goals of every link broker. At least any link broker who is selling links with the intention of boosting the link pop of its clients.

There are SOOO many advanced techniques for building links, why are people still buying links the old fashioned way?

The answer...… Because thats what most of the link brokers out there are selling.… Links on networks.  BAHHH HUMBUGGG, No wonder the term “link broker” has gotten a bad rap.

My advice… When buying links stay away from brokers who use automated link placement technologies.  Those sorts of links almost always leave a signature that the search engines can spot and will eventually end up being devalued. 

BEGIN SELF-PROMOTION

Textlinkbrokers uses a manual placement process on about 95% of our inventory.  Each webmaster places links in their own format, which means there are no network signatures.  For the sites in our inventory that utilize our automated placement scripts, we try and randomize the ad block so that it does not leave a signature.

With all that being said, buying links that are placed in advertising blocks is far from the most optimal way to build links that look natural and work for the long term.  We still sell these sorts of links because they can be powerful in the short term, but we recommend to all of our customers that they utilize our more advanced long term link building programs in combination to buying “Ad Links”

Here are some of the more advanced link building programs that we offer.

- Hosted Marketing Pages - Optimized pages that are hosted on our inventory partner sites.  These pages link to your site in a very natural way which is nearly impossible for search engines to automatically detect.  They are also great for pre-selling your product or service.  The pages are informative and are custom written by out team of professional writers.  Each page is designed to be optimized for your keywords so that they can pass relevant link popularity to your site. 

- Article Marketing - Articles are great for building natural looking text links as well as announcing your website to the world, causing people to naturally link to you.  This is the service I recommend to all of our clients. 

- Permanent Links - Our Permanent links are designed to be high quality directory style links.  With strategic anchor text optimization as well as customized surrounding text, our perm links have helped thousands of our customers rank better.

- Custom Link Baiting and Link Management Programs - There are so many ways to build links.  The programs that we provide to the general public are designed to be “One size fits all”.  While that is great for most of our clients, our high level clients prefer our customized link building strategies.  Through custom link building programs we can creativily build links that can get even the most competitive industry sites to the top.

We have helped dozens of our clients rank in the top 3 for some of the most competive industries including:

Dating, Gambling, Home Loans and Mortgages, Software, Pharmaceutical and Health Products, to name just a few.

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Although our Account Managers work with clients starting at $50 per month, if you are interested in High Level, Strategic, Link Building Management/Consulting and have a budget of at least $10,000 per month, please contact me directly at Jarrod@textlinkbrokers.com I personally oversee all of our custom link building programs but am very picky about the customers I work with.  I only have a limited amount of time available for consulting so I prefer to work with customers who have good business models and who are looking to build out strategies for 1 yr or longer.

Sometimes you see promotions come along and you wonder:  did they just do that?  The current MSN promotion called msnsearchandwin is a prime example of this.

Not only do they use “black hat” or at least “questionable” tactics on the site, but the messaging is inconsistent.

In this article I look at the new MSN promotion and ask the question:  Why bother?

I recently had the opportunity to discuss SEO/SEM with The American Cancer Society.  What you are about to read is part two of my interview with David Neff, the Director of Online Communications for the American Cancer Society High Plains Division. Click here to read part one.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss SEO/SEM with a non-profit organization.  The conversation didn’t start with SEO/SEM but I got to thinking:  How does a non-profit do SEO/SEM?

Having been in the industry a while I have a pretty good idea what the going rate is for professional SEM and I find it hard to believe that a non-profit firm would invest in it, knowing that in some cases it’s hard to measure.

What you are about to read is part one of a two part interview with the Director of Online Communications for the American Cancer Society High Plains Division.

There has been a virtual explosion of social networking sites in the past couple of years.  Even the big players like Google, Yahoo and MSN are getting into it.

With so much interest in how social networks work, one begins to wonder if there is marketing potential within these social networks?

There’s been a lot of talk these past couple days about Google Desktop Search and how there are serious privacy concerns with the new application.

The biggest concern seems to come with the ability to search and share multiple computers with one account.  In other words, you could use a single desktop search account to search, index and allow you to share files between your desktop and laptop for example.

But are these concerns grounded in truth?  Is there really a privacy issue here?

Perform a search for [olympics] on Google - you should see a rather large space taken up by video results.

I can’t be certain but I think this is the first time I’ve seen video results in main organic results.…

Around the time Google announced “Big Daddy,” there was a new Googlebot roaming the web.  Since then I’ve heard stories from clients of websites and servers going down and previously unindexed content getting indexed.

I started digging into this and you’d be surprised at what I found out.

Technorati has been reporting quarterly on the state of the blogosphere.  The blogosphere is a term they have coined to mean the blog world.

In the most recent “State of the Blogosphere” they have reported that the blogging world continues to expand at an incredible rate.

So this leads to the question:  Are you blogging?  And if not, why?  In this article I look at blogs in general and why they are good for your business.

Many times, a site gets very large and its ability to rank well in competitive markets decreases in part because of the size of the site.  While we in the business know that content is king more often than not it is a combination of content and effective site structure which will ultimately help your pages rank.

In this article I look at how to most effectively structure your site to take advantage of this.

I just don’t get it.  Advertisers spend millions of dollars for a 30 second or 1 minute spot in a football game yet in many cases they fail to follow through online.

I mean, if you are going to spend that much money to get your product visible wouldn’t you want to back that up somehow?

In this article I look at some of the shortcomings of a Super Bowl campaign and what I think advertisers should be doing about it.

Recently I had a friend, who is an independent film maker, approach me about promoting his creations online.

He’s part of a new breed of content creator.  One who prefers to try to promote his vision of things without the help of “traditional” services like agents and studios.

In fact, the whole area of self publishing and promoting your own content is one that is rapidly expanding.  But what I found in helping him is that there are other areas of the web which could also be commercialized to a certain extent.