Here are some ideas on what you should resolve to do in 2011 to keep the momentum going:

1. Build Smarter Links. For years link builders have ignored the warnings regarding  over optimization of anchor text.  Google tightened its grip even further in 2010 causing many link builders to lose rankings because their link profile looked too artificial.  Make it a 2011 resolution to mix up your anchor text as much as possible, include more branded links, and link to deep pages.
2. Blog More. Why it took so long is a mystery, but 2010 was the year when most companies realized the hidden potential waiting in their corporate blogs, simply by including keyword-rich content. If you’re doing that now, you’re probably seeing the results. If you haven’t started, get going. If you’re not much of a writer, find someone in your company who can write to be the “voice” of your company. While you’re at it, resolve in 2011 to be a guest blogger on at least one other website. It helps to establish you as an expert in your field. What’s more, you get a one-way link back to your site, and you certainly can’t get enough of those.
3. Re-energize your PPC campaign. If you’re using paid search, look at what you’re paying for and make sure it’s still working for you. Create some new targeted ad groups, new ads, and landing pages to maximize your conversion rates.
4. SEO, Meet Marketing. Whether you have in-house marketing and SEO departments, or you farm everything out, you need to establish rapport between the creative’s and the nerds. Make sure everybody’s on the same path when it comes to your marketing goals. The creative department needs to know how to please search engines, and the SEO geeks should know why the site has to look good.
5. Tweet. A lot. To many of you, that sounds like a waste of time, and a year ago you may have been right. But not anymore. This year, literally millions of companies established a Twitter presence. They use it for everything from simple announcements to special offers and free giveaways to their followers. Twitter is an instant audience; its brevity makes it perfect for conveying messages in a “can’t-wait” world. While we’re on the subject, make it a point in 2011 to be more social in general .Get active on your Facebook site. Make it work for you.
6. Communicate with your SEOs. Too many companies are happy to just let the SEO do his business and wait for the phone to ring. But nobody’s perfect. You may hear about a new trend that sounds interesting to you that your SEO hasn’t discovered yet. Don’t wait, call. If you don’t understand what SEO is, and you simply have a person who does it because somebody said you should, you need to sit down with that person and learn as much about it as you can.
7. Focus on local/Mobile search. Currently, there are at least 4.6 billion mobile subscribers in the world. That’s half the world’s population. Can people find your business with their smart phone? If not, why not? Talk to your SEO provider and start being seen.
8. Read More. Sure, this SEO and link building stuff gets pretty dry if you’re not in the business. But it’s information you need to know.

Happy New Year from all of us to all of you!

The first is actually a forum discussion from the well known Webmaster World forums. It begins by asking the question: Does natural link building actually take place?

There is a lot of debate over this topic as you will see if you decide to read all 79 responses. And there are some good tips (as there are in the SEOmoz video below). For example, someone suggested a contest website.

Searchnewz has a good article discussing link exchange no-no’s. If you are involved in link exchanges this may be a worthwhile read for you.

The author tells of a story where someone approaches him for a 3-way link exchange. Yet it seems as if this person is not allowing search engines to index their links pages, therefore there is no value in the exchange except for the person who did the approaching.

It brings up a good point though – just because someone says they want to exchange links with you doesn’t always mean your site will benefit. It would be worthwhile to spend a few minutes checking out the page(s) where your link(s) will appear to ensure that you get some benefit.

SEOmoz is doing something interesting in a few of their posts, and they have one such post talking about link building.

They actually have a video embedded into a page which discusses link building tactics. Nice and easy to watch someone discuss link building then have to read through long web pages.

They provide some great tips such as providing awards to your competitors, blog about someone you want a link from and more. It’s only just over 5 minutes, but you may learn a lot in that time.

The Blog Herald has an interesting article providing pointers on setting up a link blog within your blog. This is something a lot of bloggers are doing – setting up blogrolls or other automated systems whereby links are exchanged (or just posted) to other sites which the blog owner feels is relevant to their own.

Personally, I do have a blogroll on my blog that links out to a few other sites. Blogrolls are very handy for many bloggers as they don’t require a lot of technical know-how to implement or manage.

Link Building Tip of the Week

Here’s a good one for you. If you haven’t already done so, set up a LinkedIn profile. Be sure to add your URL in your profile. To help build your profile invite people you know as well as importing your contacts to see who else is LinkedIn.

It seems as if a topic is “hot” for a while and then the focus of industry bloggers moves. But that doesn’t mean that people should change their focus from link building.

Link building is still key to a website’s performance online. And as the following articles suggest, there are many different ways to get those links.

The first article to tell you about is great at reinforcing the basics. Foundational Links are those which support your site long term. Much like the foundation of your home is used to build your home on, foundational links help support your ongoing link building efforts. Foundational links include directory links, authority links and more.

Once your foundational links are in place, you can look at other tactics for increasing the number of links. For example, Webpronews has an article on how to get .EDU links. Keep in mind that this tactic may be considered shady by some, so you should weight the pros and cons of such a move should you decide to use it.

And if you were wondering if edu Links will ever lose their luster I’d suggest checking out this article on SEOmoz. It does a very good job of outlining the pros and cons of gaming .edu sites and what the search engine’s reaction might be.

Problogger has a good article entitled “What’s the Lowdown on Digg Bait?” in which the author discusses whether it’s better to write for Digg or users? Personally I think you can do both and still make an article “Digg-worthy” it just takes a little practice.

For those who must optimize large enterprise sites, or networks of webites, SEOmoz touches on a great subject – linking strategies for enterprise sites. Personally I have had to define a linking strategy for a network of sites and it can be overwhelming to some. Explaining this network link strategy to stakeholders can be an even more daunting challenge. But when you consider it is much easier to build links from within than without, one begins to see the benefit of working together.

Sometimes, however internal politics get in the way of working together. This too I learned from experience. But that aside, if you can work with other site owners within your organization it will be to the benefit of all involved.

Link Building Tip of the Week

I may have mentioned this software before, but I thought I’d bring it up again because of the great improvements it’s recieved lately.

SEO Spyglass is a platform independent (which means it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux) competitive intelligence tool which can gather your competitors links. Further, it can help you to perform some very detailed analysis on those harvested links, showing you things like the PageRank of both the linking page and main domain, anchor text, if it’s reciprocal or not and a whole lot more.

Best of all, these features are included in the free version, with a few more in the paid version. If you are comfortable with your own link building but looking for just a little more help consider this software.

Well that’s about it – like I said it’s been very quiet on the link building news front. But as with all trends I’m sure the focus will change again soon.

First was a good article on how to earn link love on the Marketing Pilgrim site. It included such time honored traditions as “link out” and “comment on other blogs.” Now before you start saying “yes but this is oriented at blogs” consider that the tips provided work well for all sites, not just blogs. Granted some items are blog related (like using trackbacks) but most other tips can be easily implemented into most modern CMS sites nowadays. Even a hand coded site can use these with a little work.

The other MVP (Most Valuable Post) came from Todd, aka Stuntdubl. It is one I’m sure you will bookmark and come back to again and again.

The SEO Playbook is one of the most comprehensive posts on both link building and SEO in general. I will warn you that it is a long post, which is why you will probably want to bookmark it and come back to it periodically. But I highly recommend it!

Todd also had another great post on buying links. He revisits an earlier post which discusses buying links. In his latest post, entitled I am not a Link Communist Revisited: Perspectives on Buying Links. Todd looks at buying links from a few perspectives. His conclusion? There’s nothing wrong with buying relevant links.

SearchNewz has a summary of the “Linking Strategies” seminar at SES NY that also has some good link building tips. I particularly like the section on finding quality directories.

Link Building Tip of the Week

Pegasus Directory has a large list of other directories to which you can submit your site. The nice thing is that they are organized by PageRank which means you could start at the top and work your way down the list. The only thing you may find is that a few of the directories marked as free are actually paid. But other than that it is a nice easy list to work off of.

There you have it, the top link building news of the past two weeks that we could find. Be sure to come back next time for the next edition.

I’ve always been a fan of Search Engine Guide. And this week has been no exception. Jennifer Laycock has put together a great series on why links matter. Starting with part one and continuing through part two and part three, Laycock gives us a brief summary of what links are and how search engines use them.

It is interesting to read especially to anyone who has been in the SEO industry for a while as it can help bring you back to your roots.

So now that you know why linking matters, let us look at some ways others have suggested to get those links.

For example, Webpronews explains how to “get links from A-list bloggers” while we also learn “66 ways to build links in 2007.” And while you may already be familiar with these, it doesn’t hurt to review them.

Now, if you’ve ever wondered why you should deep link, check this article out. It gives some good reasons why deep linking is important. For example, linking to older content helps expose your readers to content they may not have already seen. Plus it can help get older content re-indexed, as well as maybe finding you new visitors.

There was an interesting post on Webpronews which reflects on an older topic discussed by SEOBook about link equity. It talks about how PageRank is dead (according to some) and instead we should focus on the concept of link equity – or how one can more readily control the link popularity flowing through a site, and in fact perhaps even improve upon it.

The goal is to ensure that your site has maximized its link popularity through the use of nofollow and robots.txt exclusion so that pages that don’t need link popularity (such as duplicated content) don’t get it while pages which do, do get it.

Finally in news today, hot on the heels of news we brought you last time of how Google Webmaster Central is now reporting inbound link counts, we have learned that Google now reports on the anchor text found on those links. If you have a Google Webmaster Central account you can now log in, select “Webmaster Tools,” choose your domain if you have more then one, click the “statistics tab” and then “page analysis.” Here you will see a list of phrases found on external links pointing to your site.

For even more information on external links, why not try out this Greasemonkey script. Keep in mind that this is for the Firefox web browser and you need the Greasemonkey extension installed.

Link building tip of the day

Todays link building tip is an interesting twist on link submissions. With bufusite.net you are encouraged to submit deep links to your site. In other words, if you have some great informative content, but its buried deep in your site, submit those pages rather than your home page.

This is a relatively new directory and it already has a Google PageRank of 4. That means as this directory becomes more popular you should its link popularity also rise which means those deep links you submitted will start earning some link popularity for your site.

From methods for passionate link building to search engines updating link counts we have it covered.

So you have been doing link building for a while and have lost your spark. You are viewing link building more like a chore than anything else. If this is you then check out this article on SearchEngineLand. In it you will learn 3 techniques which can help you get that spark back. They include: Refer & Recommend, Show and Tell, and Expose Yourself.

Now, the titles may not mean what you think therefore you should check the article out.

In the tactics area there is an article which talks about how you can boost link popularity using PRWeb. This may not be what you think. In fact, it doesn’t require submitting press releases at all.

According to this article, if a blogger references a PRWeb release they will give it a trackback. That means, if you link to a PRWeb page from within a blog post, and then let them know of the link, they will give you a trackback, or static hyperlink (without a nofollow tag), back to your site.

If you are not a blogger, or are unfamiliar with the whole trackback thing and want to use other link building methods, then perhaps you should read “Guidelines on How to Ask for a Link.” In it you may find useful tips on how to achieve the holy grail of link building – links from authoritative highly relevant sites.

If you use services like Google Webmaster Tools, or Yahoo Site Explorer then you may already know that each is reporting an increase in backlinks to your domain. If you hadn’t noticed then perhaps you will find out more by reading this post at SearchEngineLand or this one found at SEORoundtable. Each discuss the new link counts.

It is worthwhile to note that while Google reports new backlinks within webmaster tools, they aren’t showing increased link counts when you do a “link:yourdomain.com” query. This should change in the next few weeks, however.

Link Building Tip of the Week

There is a new directory out which is offering free one way links. It is called “Web Friendly Directory” and it offers both free one-way links and sponsored links. It is well organized and offers search engine friendly static URLs for the categories.

All that you need is a valid email address to submit the required notification.

So there you have it – the top link building articles of the past two weeks. Be sure to check back soon for another installment.

But Google wasn’t the only one making news. Robert Scoble declared the “best linkbaiter” and there were a couple articles on grabbing links via linkbaiting as well as the potential pitfalls of a good text link.

So let’s get to the Google news first.

It has been all over the web – the fact that Google now considers Google bombs to be ancient history.

That is because they claim to have refined their algorithms enough to negate the Google bomb effect. And to be honest, a few checks of my favorite Googlebombs do show that they no longer exist.

For example, a search for “failure“, “miserable failure” and a handful of other similar terms seemed to always return the Whitehouse bio page for President Bush. That has since been removed.

Now you may be wondering “what is a Google bomb?” Well it’s nothing terror related. It’s simply a way to fool Google into giving a site a high ranking based on a huge volume of links. For example, in the above instance, there were an enormous number of sites linking to the bio page using the same anchor text. Therefore the page was getting an unnatural amount of link popularity for those phrases.

This is also why we recommend rotating your anchor text when you do link building. Because if engines like Google see that all your links have the same anchor text your site could then also lose its rankings for that phrase because Google may have determined that your linking strategy was similar to a Google bomb.

Now this doesn’t mean that every single link should be different, but it does mean you should have a variety of phrases at hand and rotate some links every so often.

We could have linked to a variety of articles talking about this particular topic, but we found a pretty decent Wired article explaining what happened and why.

The other important Google news has to do with the ability to now get a more accurate count of your site’s Google links.

This has been an ongoing problem for webmasters and a real sore spot for most SEM’s because of Google’s apparent inability to show us all the links it has found pointing to a particular site.

For example, when you do a “link:somesite.com” search on the 3 main engines you could get a few hundred or thousand links on Yahoo! and MSN, but as few as a dozen on Google.

This is because Google claims to only show a portion of links (which represent all your links) and they also filter out non-relevant links.

All that changed with the addition of a “links” tab in your Google Webmasters Console.

If you have a Google account you too can get access to this valuable information. Simply browse over to Google Webmaster Central and sign in. Once there, create and submit your sitemap and watch the valuable data begin to flow your way.

You can find out more about it on our own blog, where Jarrod wrote a good article explaining it. Also, for more information on Google Webmaster Central, check out the Webmaster help center.

So, who is the world’s best linkbaiter? Well if you are Robert Scoble you think it’s Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple.

So why is Jobs the “world’s best linkbaiter?” Because he stirs up controversy.

You see, Jobs recently published his “Thoughts on Music” in which he discusses DRM (Digital Rights Management) on the music industry. It has since caused quite a stir, but does that make him the world’s best linkbaiter? We’ll let you be the judge of that.

Speaking of linkbait, there is a good article over at WebProNews that talks about what it takes to create good linkbait.

Really, it’s common sense – if you want to capture links and become a good linkbaiter you really need to get your titles down. After all, the title is what initially catches the eye and if it isn’t compelling enough to capture the click, it probably isn’t going to be compelling enough to link to.

Finally today, Searchnews has a good write up on the dangers of over-optimizing your link text. In it the author discusses how Google and other engines are attempting to combat “artificial” link building through complex analysis of the links pointing to your site.

The article then goes on to explain that your links need to appear natural – even if you are attempting to artificially influence your link popularity. That means you must mix up your link text and descriptions as well as your link sources.

For example, if you submit your site to some 2^nd and 3^rd tier directories but use the same title and description for all submissions, then the engines are going to soon figure out that you are trying to artificially improve your link popularity. And since they now know this there is a better chance that your site will stick on their radar for a while. Furthermore any other links you get that use the same or similar anchor text could then be devalued or ignored based on the above logic – that you are attempting to artificially inflate your link popularity.

But hope is not lost, the article provides links to a few helpful tools to help you analyze your backlink anchor text to ensure that your site doesn’t trip any alarms.

Link Building Tip of the Week

We are now at that point in the newsletter where we provide you with a useful link building tip or site.

And today we recommend Directory Critic. It is a fairly new list of directories but they offer some different sites you may not have heard of before.

Further, they have categorized their directories into such categories as free and paid, niche and deep linking, and more.

So if you were looking for specific sources of links why not check out Directory Critic.

So there you have it – a summary of the comings and goings of the link building world. Be sure to watch for our next summary of link building news.

That is because it is all the SEO and link building industry is talking about – What is link baiting? What constitutes “good” link bait? How do I link bait?

But we find that we aren’t the only ones getting a little tired of hearing about link bait. Don’t misunderstand – we are big fans of the tactic, however as you are about to read, there are others who wish there was less link bait about link baiting.

So before we get into some of the other topics, let’s first look at the different link baiting articles. And there were plenty these past two weeks:

• Is it Linkbait or Link Bait?


• Learning About Linkbaiting


• What is Linkbait?


• Clever Linkbait Tactic


• Have You Created Linkbait Lately?


• 2007 Linkbaiting


• From Linkbaiting to Widgetbaiting

As you can see, lots of discussion on link baiting, but it didn’t end there. Copyblogger came out saying they too are tired of the term linkbaiting. That of course doesn’t mean they won’t partake in it, just not refer to it as “linkbaiting.”

So if not linkbait then what? How about Link Ninjas?

In the above SEOMoz article, a discussion is started on the value of linkbaiting versus Jim Boykin’s Link Ninja theory. We think they both have a point and, in fact, both tactics are useful. Even more so when combined.

But if you just aren’t into fads or trends and instead are concerned with merely building high quality links, using old fashioned tactics, may we suggest the following reading:

To start with, don’t think of link building as just a way to inflate your rankings. Think of it as relationship building as Jennifer Laycock suggests.

Then, once you feel you have that mastered, Chris Sherman has some tips on the right way to ask for links.

Of course, there’s still a lot of ground to cover between understanding what a good link is and actually asking for one. Therefore we’d suggest reading these two articles on how to figure out which links are good: Five link building strategies that work, and the ultimate guide to building the perfect link, both of which are excellent examples of good link bait, too by the way.

And of course, if you find link building too time consuming, consider buying links. If so we’d also suggest reading about paid links that are truly undetectable to learn a few tips on buying links.

Link building Tip of the Week

There is a relatively new directory out there which has been gaining in popularity these past few months. And while one would think that with a name like The SEOKing it’s bound to be penalized, and any outbound links found to be worthless this isn’t the case.

In fact we’ve found that the site is well respected by the engines. Further they have a quick turn around time for approving link submissions.

So if you are looking for a quick, free link submission, consider theSEOKing.com.

We just released the first version of our “Beginners Guide to Buying Links for SEO”. We’ve included lots of useful tips on how to successfully buy links to increase your search engine rankings. We plan on adding new sections frequently. If you have any questions or sections you would like to see added, please email me directly at jarrod (a)(t) textlinkbrokers.com. Please use the subject “Link Buying Guide”.

http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/link-buying-guide.html

Need some Extra Good Karma? Help us by Digging This!

So, is link baiting bad? Or are there good things to consider? Well we have a couple of articles that go into this topic, as well as providing more link baiting ideas, a couple of discussions on Google’s �link:� query, an article on link neighborhoods and much more.

Normally, we bring you the top 5 links of the past two weeks, but this past couple of weeks there were lots of really great discussion around the topic of links. It was too hard to limit ourselves to 5 so we didn�t. Instead we bring you the top ones we’ve found. There are about 10 in all.
So let’s get into this link baiting discussion first.

The debate began on Webpronews with the article entitled “Quality Content vs. Link Bait.” In it, the author discusses what link bait is, and more importantly how an SEM can use it for their customers. But then, a couple of days later, again on Webpronews, some controversy with the article “Link Bait: The Path To An Improved Web” where the question is asked: Is Link-bait Ruining The Web?

Of course if you didn’t want to get into the whole �is link baiting good or bad� debate you could have just went on to the third article found on Webpronews dealing with link baiting: “21 Link Baiting Ideas.” And if you wanted to steer clear of the whole link baiting topic, there is a great article about “Developing Your Internal Link Structure” which highlights some great points that some webmasters forget when designing a site. If you are concerned about your own internal link structure I recommend this article.

Promotion Data has an interesting article entitled “The effect of bad neighborhood links on your web site rankings” in which the topic of bad links is discussed. There is a common misconception that if you have a few �bad� links to your site that you will be penalized. However, since you really don’t have any control over who links to you, how can you control those bad links? Simple: You can’t and the engines know this. The article does bring up some good information though, so if you were concerned about �bad� links, it’s worth the read.

Over at Searchnewz there is a good article which explains just what a link is. The article is called “A Link Is A Reference And What It Is For Us” and as you would expect, it does explain how a link is perceived by the engines.

In the forums there were a couple of threads which were very similar in that they both asked the question: How come I can’t see all my links in Google? Well, for the answers, check out this SearchEngineWatch thread, or this SEORoundtable thread. Both essentially say the same thing, but it is still interesting to see this question come up over and over.

Link Building Tip of the Day:
Finally, today we bring you what is probably one the most valuable free tools you will ever use. Instead of giving a site for a link, we thought we’d bring you a tool.

It’s actually a website called SpyFu and with this site you can do a whole bunch of competitive analysis. In fact, that’s what it is primarily for � to �spy� on your competition. But, there is another great use for it � link harvesting. And here’s how you do it:

Let’s say you are in the clothing industry. You click the “Industries” link where you are presented with a list of industries. If you click on Wholesale/Retail link you are presented with another list of results. Continue clicking through until you find the industry which most closely matches your own and you will then see the top competing sites, as well as a bunch of other information.

Now this is where SEO’s go off to explore keywords, and PPC people explore bids, but this is also where link builders can begin their harvesting.

For example, if I sold shoes, I could get down to the level where I see there are almost 200 top competing sites and almost 800 different top terms. From there I can either begin harvesting links from these top sites, or begin harvesting links via these top terms. Or, if I wanted to, I could click on the competitor, or the term and get more details. Spyfu is really a competitive intelligence dream because of the information it can provide.

So there you have it � the top link building links of the past 2 weeks, and an incredibly useful new tool which you can use to help acquire links.