Over this past year we introduced a slew of new products, services and strategies for our clients. We serviced thousands of customers, increased our staff by over 50% and we are moving into a new office with 12,000+ square feet of space (JP Morgan’s former A+ office) in Mesa, AZ on January 17th.

We are fortunate considering the poor economic climate our world is enduring. The good news, our clients are seeing similar good fortune to us. Our superior strategies, customized services and full internet marketing integration are the primary drivers.

Whether you need traffic, leads or sales, we are developing strategies that integrate local marketing, on/off-page SEO with a particular focus on premium quality custom link acquisition, public relations, social media marketing, reputation management, conversion optimization and website design. The integrated strategy is the key to your online business success.

Once the dust settles, we will take you on a blog tour of our new facilities and show you some pictures of the people that work so hard on your behalf.

We are ready to meet 2011 with a bang that will increase our clients’ bottom-line like never before. Thank you to all of our customers for your business over 2010.

If you aren’t a client, come check us out.

Here is a picture in front of the new office building of the entire TextLinkBrokers Arizona staff

Google understands that one of the easiest and most powerful ranking factors to game in its algorithm is the anchor text contained in your backlinks.  As expected, they are becoming increasingly diligent in their efforts to  detect artificial anchor text patterns.  If a large portion of new backlinks pointing to your site are using the same anchor text, there is a good chance that Google’s algorithms will detect it and lower your overall trust score.  If your website’s trust score lowers significantly enough you will likely see a decrease in the velocity of your ranking improvements.  Once your trust score falls below a certain threshold, you may see very few ranking improvements or in the worst case you may lose rankings.

While it is possible to obtain quick rankings by targeting only a few keywords, the benefits will be short-term. The more aggressive you become in building links to a small number of individual keywords the more likely you will lower your trust score and see lowered returns on your link building efforts.

How aggressive should you be and what is the proper anchor text strategy?

There is not one simple answer to this question.  However, TLB’s account managers are highly trained in research, data analysis and strategy development.  Determining the proper anchor text strategy for our clients is something we do every day.  Here are a couple of points to consider when building your strategy:

• How old/established is your site?
  • Older more established sites with natural looking backlink profiles can be more aggressive with their link building because they typically have higher trust scores
• How many links are you building per month on quality sites?
  • Increase the number and density of keyword-targeted links and branded links each month in order to establish an increasing link popularity trend in your backlink profile. If you notice your competitors being much more aggressive and successful with keyword-driven anchor text, up the number in your profile, but do not attempt to outdo them. Remember, you are in this for the long haul.
  • In general, building a large amount of links in a short time period is not, in itself, risky as long as they are quality links and you are utilizing the right anchor text strategy. Look to build links on sites that do not have paid links that standout (in sidebars, footers, etc…) and webmasters are not monetizing them with irrelevant text link ads with highly commercialized anchor text. Hint: Use branded keywords often when building large amounts of links.
• How does your anchor text profile compare to that of your competitors?
  • Use OpenSiteExplorer.org to look at the anchor text distribution of your top ranking competitors.  If most of your competitors have commercial keywords as the majority of their anchor texts (versus branded keywords such as their site names), then you can be a bit more aggressive in targeting individual anchor texts.
  • Keep in mind that just because your competitor may have a high density of commercial keywords as their top anchor texts, it does not mean that they did it overnight.
• How many branded keywords exist in your backlink profile?
  • With recent changes to Google’s algorithm, it is becoming apparent that they are expecting to see  a higher percentage of branded links versus keyword based links.
    • For example, in most industries it is very common to see a companies name or their website URL (and many variations thereof) as the anchor text for the majority of their links.  Most natural links do not contain commercial keywords for anchor text.  Keep this in mind while building links; the more branded links you build the more aggressive you can be with keyword-based links.

One of the concepts we stress most to our clients is to be patient. Trying to build too many links and targeting too few anchor texts in a short period is only asking for trouble.  You may see great rankings initially but it will become increasingly difficult over time to move your rankings higher if your trust score is falling.  As always, we are here to help you navigate these complex waterways.

Google calls this methodology its “Reasonable Surfer” model. Specifically, it states the value of a link on a page – its “weight,” or influence — varies from link to link, and depends primarily on its position on the page, the link color, the anchor text used, among other factors. Links that appear above the fold, particularly near the top of the page, are considered the most prime, or weightiest, locations.

The Reasonable Surfer officially replaces Google’s initial way of thinking about search behavior, called the “Random Surfer.” In 1998, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page described the random surfer as someone “who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting ‘back’ but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page.” People became much more sophisticated by 2004, which led to the new ranking methodology.  In other words, people dont just click “Randomly” on links on a page, there are specific “behavioral patterns” that can be detected and used to determine which links are more likely to be clicked.

While the announcement that Google had received the patent for the Reasonable Surfer methodology made all of the SEO news sites, it really wasn’t stunning news. The industry has presumed – although Google has never officially confirmed (To our knowledge) – that it has been following this model since they filed the patent request.   Our own experience shows that this methodology has been in place for many years, although the amount of weight given to certain link locations etc.. has likely changed with time.  Footer links are a great example of this.  Over time we have noticed a steady decline in the effectiveness of footer links.

Overall, the methodology makes sense. Give more value to links that appear to be built to attract human clicks, versus links placed purely for seo link value.

So what does this mean for your link building campaigns?  Try to get links that users will click on. The more likely that the link will be clicked the more weight Google is likely giving that link. With that being said, we can tell you that even links in sub-prime locations still have value.  It isn’t necessary for every link you build to be in-content, above the fold etc..  and in most cases it would be financially restrictive to do so, but it sure is worth aiming for.

TextLinkBrokers offers many link services specifically geared towards acquiring these types of links.  Ask us about our Custom Link Acquisition program.  You can experience the power of properly placed links yourself!

So in this article we thought we’d give you a brief recap of what link baiting is as well as some of the types of “proven” link baiting there are.

These examples of link building have been used by some of the best in the industry.

What is Link Baiting?

Link baiting is a way to capture links to your site through targeted means. Just like you’d use different bait to catch different types of fish, your link baiting efforts should be tailored to the audience you want to attract links from.

For example, many SEO firms use link baiting as a way of capturing links from other SEO firms. And as we know the more relevant, related links a site has the better it should do in the search engines.

I think one of the better link baiters out there today is Rand Fishkin (yes that’s his real name). His website, SEOmoz.org uses a variety of the best link baiting techniques out there.

So what is it that Rand and his crew does so well? Well, let’s take a look:

Link Baiting Technique #1 – Lists

SEOMoz is big on lists. Sure they do all sorts of link baiting but lists seem to drive the most traffic (and get the most notice) for the site.

Now you are probably saying to yourself “great lists – but what kind of lists?” Well that depends again on your audience – who you want to get links from.

In the case of SEOMoz, they are trying to capture links from SEO/SEM sources. Therefore their lists are geared towards search engine marketings, optimization experts and even web designers. Let’s take a look at a few of their lists:

5 HTML elements you probably never use (but perhaps should). Right away you can see this article has a compelling title. And that’s a big part of the success of your own link baiting. The title has to catch the eyes of your audience, or it just won’t encourage them to click through to and read (and hopefully link to) your article.

Here’s another aimed at the designer/SEO crowd: How to use AJAX: 5 Real World Examples. This is an article on a fairly new web technique. Many sites are experimenting or using AJAX as part of their arsenal of tools. So the folks as SEOMoz have tapped into that and provided yet another list.

This also brings up another important point. Your articles should be relevant and timely. For example, while A list of top reasons why MSN should enter into the organic search space (for example) may be relevant to the organic search engine optimization space, is not timely.

Straight Answers to 25 SEO Questions is one of those articles which may be geared towards one new to SEO/SEM but it’s also a great way to get links from other SEO firms.

These are just a few of the examples of good link baiting using lists. We’ve done the same here as well. We’ve provided a List of quality web directories, Some of the Best Manual Link Building Techniques in one Article, and even My Favorite Helper Applications. All were lists created not only to help others in the field but also generate traffic (and links) to this site.

But let’s say you aren’t big on lists. Perhaps you are in an industry that doesn’t really care about lists. What then?

Link Baiting Technique #2 – Tools

Another thing that SEOMoz.org does well is link baiting through new SEO tools.

Not only do they promote other tools they’ve found useful but they occasionally release their own tools.

Of course spending money to build a tool that is used for link baiting isn’t necessarily a wise decision, however if it’s a tool the industry can benefit from and it’s a good way to build up incoming links to your site, why not use it?

For example, SEOmoz recently released a Page Strength tool which combines a variety of factors to help you determine how “strong” your page is. While I don’t know for sure, I can almost guarantee that SEOmoz got a ton of traffic for the tool because of the buzz it generated in the SEO community.

Even a tool review works wonders. We profiled a variety of tools here as well recently. Again while the goal was to help and inform, it was also to help build incoming links.

And if reviewing tools or building them are just out of the question, consider other useful things you use in your day to day tasks.

For example, with my previous employer I had a spreadsheet that did all kinds of things from scrape a SQL database and format the data, to perform complex calculations on that data. I’m sure such a spreadsheet could be useful to other firms.

Even something as simple as a checklist could be found useful by others, encouraging them to link to you. Do you have a link building checklist? Perhaps you have a checklist of items you look at when performing search engine optimization? Why not post these checklists in hopes of encouraging incoming links?

Link Baiting Technique #3 – News

Sometimes the best link bait is just plain old news. But not rehashing what everyone else is saying. If you’ve got an edge or a unique perspective on something timely, why not post it in an article on your site?

Did you recently interview Matt Cutts or Danny Sullivan? If so, these would be great link bait.

Of course, in terms of interviews, the higher profile the person is the more likely you will garner a larger number of inbound links, but even if you interview someone with a lower profile it can still help.

Another great way to link bait with news is to report on findings of a case study or research you’ve performed. If you think you’ve discovered a way to beat Google’s most recent algorithm, then share it! And I don’t mean running to Webmasterworld or Searchenginewatch forums and sharing it, I mean publish it. Be the first one out there to show the world that you’ve figured it out.

Granted you will also get detractors out there. Those who refute your findings but you know what? Chances are they will link to you too.

You know what they say – any link is better than none at all.

What I’ve shown here are just 3 of the many ways to increase your incoming link count.

Link baiting is proving to be a very successful way of link building with little effort. And the best part is that most of your links will be the type the search engines want to see. That is they will be relevant and related to your site.

In this article I look at MSN including it’s advanced link queries and how it too can be a valuable link building resource.

It seems like my last few articles have all been about using different search engines to find links. So today I thought I’d continue with that tradition by looking at MSN and how you can use this engine to find authoritative links.

But first let’s take a brief look at how MSN the search engine works.

Microsoft has employed what it calls a “Neural Network” for a search engine. And while this can mean many things, Microsoft claims that it’s Neural Network learns and improves. That means the system can adapt itself based on user’s interactions with the search results.

For example, if the engine notices that the #3 result for a given query is picked more often than the other 2 results then it will move that result up to the #1 or #2 spot and monitor what happens. If the click throughs drop off, it sill determine that the site performs better at #3 and will then move it back ot the original position.

The goal of the Neural Networked system is to ensure that the user gets the best experience overall.

But in Microsoft’s case they can have a distinct advantage over other engines. This is because many people have a Hotmail or MSN account. By tying your Microsoft account to your search history, MSN search can begin to build a profile of your search habits and then adapt itself to suit what it determines are your needs.

For example, if you spend a lot of your time on MSN performing vehicle related searches, but then search for “tires” it should be smart enough to know that you are likely looking for vehicle tires and not bicycle tires.

And while this technology seems impressive, it doesn’t really help us search engine marketers or link builders.

But that’s not to say that there isn’t opportunities in using MSN search.

For example, did you know that MSN search also has some pretty complex query builders? In fact, if you go to search.msn.com you will see a “Search Builder” link right below the search box. This is where you can begin to create your complex link research queries.

Now, you don’t need to use the search builder every time, but for the first time it’s handy so you can see the proper format for the query.

So let’s get into an example.

Let’s say Joe the plumber wants to research his competitors links. We already know that you can perform a “link:joescompetitor.com” query you will see all the links MSN has found pointing to the competitor. But did you know that you can further refine this query much like you can on Yahoo!?

That’s right, using the search builder you can further refine your query by looking for those links that have a phrase in and around them, as well as restricting the links to certain domains or TLD’s (Top Level Domains). You can also exclude any internal domain links to come up with a true list of all external links.

That means you can use a query like “link:joescompetitor.com -site:joes.competitor.com.” this query will show all the links pointing to Joe’s competitor but aren’t from the site. These are the true incoming links as found by MSN.

Yet there’s still more:

Let’s say you want to find out which links point to the competitor on certain key phrases. You can further restrict your query to only include those sites built around a theme.

For example, let’s say you wanted to find all sites linking to Joe’s competitor that aren’t internal links but are from pages about “plumbing.”

You would form your query like this:

“link:joescompetitor.com -site:joes.competitor.com. plumbing”

Now if you wanted to further refine the query to only return “quality” sites, such as educational institutions or government site you can do that as well.

Again, either using the search builder or typing it in yourself you can modify the query like this:

“link:joescompetitor.com -site:joes.competitor.com. plumbing inurl:edu”

This query will return all external links to the site from universities and colleges where the page contains the phrase “plumbing” or is otherwise about plumbing.

As you can see, MSN search has some of the most powerful query building out there. You can glean much more quality information using this engine than you can in Google simply because of this query refinement ability.

So the next time you are out researching link requests why not give MSN a try?

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article

In this article, I look at yet another great source of link building. One that uses technology unique to it.

There are so many search engines out there that it’s no wonder some get overlooked. One such engine is Clusty. Clusty is a clustering search engine. It is very similar to Ask in that it shows clusters of results, and allows you to easily navigate between clusters.

In fact, Clusty actually uses and displays clusters in its search results opposed to Ask that hides most of the clustering from users and only displays a selection via the widen or narrow search options.

If you want a true clustering engine, I’d recommend Clusty because it is fast and easy to use.

But, there is also great potential for link building through Clusty because of its clustering abilities.

You see, much like Ask, Clusty will organize results into groups called clusters. The following quote comes from Clusty’s site: “Thus a search for ‘pearl’ organizes the top 250-500 results into subject folders such as Jewelry, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Jam, Steinbeck Novel and Daniel Pearl.”

That means that not only has Clusty grouped results, but it has also applied similar ranking algorithms to those results ensuring that the “best” sites show up at the top.

So how do you use Clusty to build links?

The thing to remember is that Clusty is more for researching potential links. It doesn’t have a “link:” query, but it does show you what it considers “hub” or “authority” sites for a given cluster.

That means when you search on Clusty for your most important keyphrase, for example, it will return results it has determined are the most relevant to you for that phrase.

Now, you could stop after you’ve gathered the list of sites and be on your way, but you’d be missing the true power of this technology.

You see, Clusty has spent a lot of money and invested thousands of man hours to develop this clustering ability.

When you finish gathering your immediate list of potential links, why not take some time to look at the other clusters?

Remember, Clusty has determined that these other clusters could be related to your query. That means that sites found within those clusters are also likely related. Because they appear highly in Clusty, they are also likely highly authoritative in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

You see, the clustering system may provide you with opportunities you never considered before.

For example, let’s say I work for an office supply company. Of course, my first query will be for “office supplies” and I will gather as many of the sites there as possible that I think I can request links from.

But, I wouldn’t stop there. I’d also take some time to look at the other categories (clusters) available to see if there are other potential similar results, and then view the top ranked sites there as well.

For example, I see an “Office Products” cluster and an “Office Equipment” cluster that I would want to look more closely at as there are likely sites within these clusters that aren’t shown in my search results but are considered authorities.

There are also “forms, labels”, “discount”, “sales” and more categories for me to review. And this is just from a single phrase. Imagine if I were to perform this same search for a dozen other phrases?

By now you may have discovered another great use for Clusty: Keyword researching.

That’s right, the clusters themselves could be potential keywords you could further optimize your site for. Using some of the clusters as well as a free keyword research tool like Yahoo!s Search Marketing Search Term Suggestion Tool.

But wait, there’s more.

You will also see that Clusty is a meta search engine which means it goes out and scours the web for relevant related sites found on other search engines or directories. It shows you that the sites chosen also appear in other areas such as DMOZ, Wisenut, Looksmart, Ask and more.

Granted, many of these are 2nd tier engines, but the fact that the site appears in them as an authority indicates that it is important. Therefore, it’s one you likely need to research further.

So, if you feel you’ve exhausted all your link potential, think again. Clusty offers a host of new options for you to review.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article

In this article, however, I look at how you can use Google to find many more links.

As I’ve already shown, engines like Yahoo! and Clusty can provide great sources of links when used properly.

And, while I’ve indicated that link building using Google can be difficult, it’s not impossible. You just have to know how to get the most out of the engine.

I’m going to give you tips on how to build links the “old fashioned way” using Google and how to create the right queries to acquire potential links.

For this exercise you will need a spreadsheet, knowledge on simple formulas and a whole lot of time.

Let’s start with the basics:

As you know, you can build all sorts of queries in Google to find all sorts of things. And, while your typical “link:domain.com” query will return most of the links to a given site, it will not return all of them. Further, Google claims that the list returned is actually only a random sampling and that we should not put any weight on those links.

In other words, just because a link is listed in the number 1 position doesn’t make it the most important according to Google.

So, what do you do if you’ve gone through all the competitor’s links? What next?

This is where the spreadsheet and formulas come in. And, what I’m about to explain here does work because I’ve done it myself.

I must warn you though, this can be a time consuming process as the “hunt and gather” stages take some time. But, in the end, you could be surprised by the number and quality of links you can get just by investing this time.

Let’s look at other sites you can get a link from. They include other search engines and topical directories. In my previous article on about DMOZ, I illustrated how you can use the popular directory to find potential link opportunities. We’re going to use Google to do something similar and it’s such a simple thing you may wonder how you got by without it.

We know Google does keyword matching. You put in a query for “dog bones” and you get back sites using that term.

So, what happens when you put in the query “submit a site”? After all, that’s what you want to do right? Submit your site to other locations.

What you will see is a list of other directories and search engines that may provide links back to you.

Of course, there are other similar queries you can use such as “add site”, “add link”, “request link”, “submit url”, “submit site”, “submit your site”, “submit link”, and “add url”, just to name a few.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Using just these few queries, you’re bound to find hundreds of potential link opportunities. And, of course you would want to expand that list with any other variation of the “submit link” query you can come up with. Phrases such as “recommend site” and “suggest a site” and so on.

Build your list of these types of queries (I have about 50 like this) and just look at the volume of sites you could add your link to. Many are free directories that don’t garner a lot of traffic, but the link popularity you could inherit could be huge.

Now, let’s refine these queries a little more.

We all know Google prefers topical, related links so why not give this to them?

What if you were to combine those queries you came up with above with your important key phrases?

For example, let’s say you sell hubcaps. When I search for “submit link” hubcaps, I get over 350 results returned. That means over 350 potential new links to your hubcap site. Now, what if you do this with all your other queries? Again, you could end up with hundreds or thousands of potential links.

This is where the spreadsheet comes in.

What I’ve found is that you can use formulas in a spreadsheet like Excel to automate the query building process.

Excel has a great feature called “Concatenate” which allows you to join the contents of cells to create a new string.

What I’ve done is placed all my “addurl” type strings in one column and my keywords in another column and then concatenated the two to generate the queries I need to paste into Google’s search box.

So, if I have 5 important phrases and use my 50 “add a link” type queries, I come up with 250 queries to submit to Google to find sites to submit my link to. Even if I only get 100 results per query, that’s still 2500 potential links!

Here’s where it becomes time consuming – you must go through each of these links and qualify them. But, again, this is where the spreadsheet comes in handy.

What I do as I’m reviewing these sites is look at the toolbar PageRank for the home page and the directory page where my site link will likely be. Then, I grab the URL required to submit my link and paste all that information into my spreadsheet.

Once I’ve gone through most of these sites I reorder the list of potential links, usually by the PageRank of the home page, or the page where my link will reside, and then begin the submission process.

Like I said, it is a very time consuming process but one that could be very fruitful in the end.

So, if you are looking for even more link building opportunities you may find this additional tactic quite helpful.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article

But, there are other ways you can enhance these queries to make them even better at filtering the good from the bad and ugly.

In this article I look at some ways to modify these queries to find quality authority sites to help improve your link popularity.

The tactic I’m about to explain works best in Yahoo! but I’m sure the list of links you find will be transferable to Google. In other words, the query works in Yahoo! better than Google but you will still get high quality links that Google will recognize.

Typically, one of the first places one starts when building links is to got to Google and use the “link:domain.com” query. This will show you many of the links pointing to a domain in Google. According to the search engine, they put no emphasis or weight on any of the displayed links and in fact only display a random sample of the sites linking.

So really, the Google backlink query is somewhat useless from a link building perspective. This is where Yahoo! comes in.

Yahoo! has been very kind to webmasters, SEO’s and link builders. They have several developer API’s and have opened up tools like Site Explorer to help us even more.

But, even with these tools it can be tricky finding good quality links in Yahoo!

Until now, that is.

You see, Yahoo! offers greater flexibility in how you format the queries. In other words, while “linkdomain:domain.com” will show you all the links to a given domain, you could further refine that query to make it even more useful.

Let’s say you wanted to find out how many links to a domain are from related domains. For example, let’s say Joe the plumber wants to find out how many links he has from other similar sites. He could use the following query:

“linkdomain:joesdomain.com plumbing”

This query will show Joe all the links pointing to his site either from other plumbing sites, or also those sites that use the phrase “plumbing” in and around his link.

And, of course since he can do this for his own site, he can do it for competitors.

In other words, he could use the query “linkdomain:joescompetitor.com plumbing” to find those sites linking to his competitor where the link has the text “plumbing” in or around the link.

This is a very effective intelligence gathering query, but also a great way to find new sources of links.

But wait, it gets even better.

Let’s say Joe wants to find only the creme of the crop. Let’s say there are certain links he wants to find from a specific type of site.

If Joe knows that the best links are educational sites, for example, he could do a “linkdomain:joescompetitor.com inurl:edu” and it would return all links pointing to his competitor’s site that are from educational domains.

And, while this is great, there could be many non-relevant links which Joe’s competitor doesn’t get a lot of credit for. For example, Joe’s competitor may have donated money to the institution’s sports team and therefore received mention on the monthly newsletter. Even though it’s a link from an EDU site, that link isn’t worth as much.

So how does Joe find out which are the best links from a given source?

He would simply combine the above two queries.

For example, if Joe wanted to find out all the EDU sites linking to his competitor with the term “plumbing” nearby, he would query like this:

“linkdomain:joescompetitor.com plumbing inurl:edu”

This query would return all the competitor’s links from EDU domains with the phrase “plumbing” in or around the link. And, you could use similar queries for government sites (inurl:gov) as well as regionalized links (ie. Inurl:co.uk).

The variety and types of links you can find using such a query is limitless. Then, like always, once you’ve gathered a list of potential links you can approach them for a similar link to your site.

So, if you’ve become frustrated with the typical link building research, why not try this on for size? I’m sure you’ll be amazed with the results.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article

Though, there is a way that you could build links from highly popular sites and even those closely related to you given the right circumstances.

In this article I explain how this is accomplished.

This type of link building really isn’t new and it may not work for some sites, but it is effective overall and will provide you with one more source of potential links. I know it’s effective because I’ve done it for my own personal sites and it has worked wonders.

I recently wrote an article about the SEO benefits of Wiki, and it was during my research of this software that it hit me: Wiki link building. You’ve probably heard of it before, but not like this.

Let’s start with the obvious: Wikipedia. You’ve likely heard how you can use popular services like Wikipedia to submit your site via their page editor where all you need to do is find the appropriate page, edit it and add your link. I’ve done this and it does work well, provided you have a relevant site and find a good place to link from.

This is why you start with Wikipedia. With a couple simple searches I was able to find three or four pages with high link popularity and good PageRank (fours, fives and sixes). I didn’t want to be greedy so I picked a single page with the highest PageRank that was the most relevant to my site and added a link to it.

But, you must also keep in mind that there are editors for Wikipedia so there is no guarantee that your link will continue to exist. Link spamming has been an issue for Wikipedia in the past, therefore one must be extremely careful when adding your link.

Your link should provide additional details to the page of information provided. In other words, if you write an industry blog then perhaps link to that instead of your main site.

Step one of this link building plan is to submit to Wikipedia. Similarly you should find other authoritative general purpose Wiki sites. Simply perform a search for sites related to Wikipedia (using this query in Google, for example: related:wikipedia.org) and browse those sites to see if there are similar places where you can submit your link.

Again, use the same criteria as above, if you find something relevant only submit links which are of a useful nature. The best way to get your link to stick is if you offer something supplementary (such as a news of information blog) that the reader won’t get from the Wiki.

But wait, that’s not all. Sure you’ve hit the more popular Wiki sites, but did you know there are literally thousands of other more you could submit links to? And some of these sites are your competitors, suppliers, customers and so on? In other words, highly relevant to you.

What I found as I was researching both the previous article and this one is that many sites are beginning to adopt Wiki’s as a way of not only building out their site, but also providing their customers with an easy to use, searchable knowledgebase.

It is on these other Wiki’s where you can get a large number of links with little effort. And here is how you do it:

If you go to Google and perform a search for your important key phrases, surrounded by quotes and appended with Inurl:wiki, you will find those sites which have wikis related to your keywords.

Pretty simple huh?

For example, if I search for “search engine marketing” inurl:wiki in Google I get 356 results.

Granted, some of these aren’t relevant, but a quick scan of the top 20 results shows me that about half of the sites listed are related to SEM in general.

Upon reviewing these sites I have found that many require a free account to log in and edit, while some are more open, much like Wikipedia.

That means that within probably an hour I can build between 4 and 8 links to this site from these related sites! How much more relevant can those links be?

If you combine these half dozen or so links with the highly popular Wikipedia and other wiki links you’ve created in the first step, you’ve now just increased your link popularity by as much as 10 or more new links in the span of one hour!

As with Wikipedia, there is no guarantee that these links will stay there. If the owners of the competitor Wiki’s are smart, they will be monitoring changes and could remove some of those links. But there are going to be some sites where the owners don’t moderate changes. Therefore, your links will remain and you will get credit for them.

And of course you won’t want to stop at the top 10 or 20. I’d recommend doing at least the top 50, and then starting a new search for your next most important key phrase. In the end, you could have built dozens of links from other relevant sites whose link popularity will continue to grow over time, thereby inflating your link popularity.

And just so you know, when I added the link from Wikipedia to my site I noticed it in a backlink check on Google within about 6 days. Similarly it appeared in MSN and Yahoo within a couple of weeks. I check back every couple of weeks or so to ensure that it is still there, and it is, so I’m pretty sure that it will remain.

The longer it remains, the more valuable it will be to me because as more and more people link to that Wikipedia page, or the Wikipedia site in general, that link becomes worth more to me. The link popularity of that page goes up and some of that increased link popularity transfers to my site, thereby increasing my link popularity naturally without my having to do anything.

So, if you are looking for a new link building tactic, why not add this one to the arsenal?

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

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.

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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.