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

It was another great couple of weeks with lots of articles focused on link building, from building link popularity in 7 days to Digg etiquette, to Secrets of a Professional Link Builder and much more.

In this issue of our bi-monthly newsletter, we will look at some of these articles and present links to the ones we thought were the best.

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of discussion about link baiting.  From forum posts on link baiting (such as “what is it and how do I do it?") to articles explaining why some things shouldn’t be link bait.

Welcome to the first edition of the Textlinkbrokers regular newsletter.  In this and forthcoming newsletters you will find summaries and links of some of the best articles and forum discussions on links and link building in the industry, plus tips and tricks for link building.

I was just reading an article about a nifty little tool in MS Excel that allows you to populate data on a worksheet by pulling data directly from a website.  I have seen this feature before but never really saw a use for it.

Then I started thinking about SEO research and how it can be a pain to insert and format data into an excel sheet from a website.  This is tradionally a fairly manual task as it is usually not just a matter of cutting and pasting. 

As an example of one use, I played around with importing keyword data from Digitalpoint.  Sometimes we use this data to send reports to clients and to create proposals/strategies.  There are some other tools out there like wordtracker that will send you formatted keyword lists, but the method of pulling the data for yourself into an excel sheet is very convenient and can save you time and money.

So here are the basics of it.

If you open up excel and go to DATA > IMPORT EXTERNAL DATA > NEW WEB QUERY

The Web Query window will pop up.  You then need to browse to the page that you want to pull the data from.  In this case I am going to DigitalPoints Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Once you are see the data you want to import you simply checkmark which sections you want to include.  Excel makes it pretty easy since it puts most of the sections into blocks.  One problem though is that on some tools it cannot determine which sections to pull.  I tried a few different tools and Excel had problems with about half of them.

Once you select the sections you want to import and hit execute, excel will pull the data into nice clean text, right into your excel sheet.  You can then clean it up however you need to.

A couple important things.  You can select how you want excel to pull the data in. You can have it as straight text, rich text, or with full html.

There is also one other important setting.  Excel automatically assumes that you want to refresh the data every so often and will do so.  Since you only want to pull the data once, you will want to disable that feature, so that your data doesnt change.  Of course, there may be times that you might want the data to refresh.  One example might be if you are using it to pull current rankings in google.  You could set excel up to pull the data for the top 10 sites for a specific keyword.

Here are some other uses right off the top of my head.

- Collecting backlinks data from backlinks tools.
- Collecting lists of potential link partners.
etc.. etc.. etc..

What uses can you think of?

By now if you are in the online marketing industry you may have heard the term “Social Media Marketing” or “Social Media Optimization.”

These terms refer to the next generation of what online marketing will become.  It is online promotion in the Web 2.0 world.

Knowing that, we must decide how to market within the confines of this new medium.

Therefore, in this article we will take a look at some of the sites that are springing out of Web 2.0 and how, as an online marketer, we must take advantage of these sites.

There’s a new buzz word circulating through search engine marketing firms around the world.  It’s a concept that isn’t really new to a lot of people however it’s the first time a real name has been assigned to it.

The subject is SMM (Social Media Marketing) and its a new form of online marketing that has some people in the industry scared, some unsure how to proceed, and others wondering how to monetize it.

So what is SMM?  In this article (and the next few) we look at the roots of this new phenomenon to see where the idea came from.  We will also be providing a few case studies on SMM, showing how effective it has been, and give our opinion on how “big” it is going to be, as well as how important link building is to SMM.

Link baiting seems to be all the rage in todays SEO world.  But we still get asked often “what is link baiting?” or “how does link baiting work?”

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.

Imagine that :)

Rand, over at SEOMoz.org writes a great article about how “smart interlinking” between content pages on a site will lead to increased pageviews.  Although this may sound rudimentary, its one of those arts that few people ever master.

But, dont discount the SEO value of those links either. Smart interlinking, using keywords, between your pages will help the search engines figure your site out.  And thats always a good thing.

SEOmoz Blog | Link Density - A Method for Increasing Page Views

Here’s another SEO tool I would love to see built.

Site Theme Keyword Cloud Generator

This tool would allow someone to enter the URL of their site in order to have a keyword cloud built based on the keywords found throughout their site.

The tool would spider a certain number of pages (Lets say 10-100), and return a keyword cloud.

Heres an example of a keyword cloud that blinklist.com uses

It would be great to be able to visually see the theme of a site.  This would could be used to analyze your competitors or to just get a rough idea of how a search engine might see it.

If anyone wants to team up to make this tool.  Let me know.  I’ll fund it if someone wants to manage the building of it.  This would be a great free SEO tool.

For those of you who don’t already know, Aaron Wall (Seobook.com) released his “SEO for Firefox” extension (SFF) a few weeks ago.  It has gotten some really great reviews so far.  I started using it last week and it has already saved me a good amount of time.

In Aaron’s own words:

SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results.

If your a link builder it can be a real lifesavor.  It’s also great for researching domains for acquisition.

Out of the box, SFF only pulls pagerank automatically.  If you dont mind your searches being slowed down a bit you can default it to include actual data of things such as Age, Yahoo Backlinks, Links in DMOZ…

Even with all the options defaulted on, SFF will show you the search results first and then add the additional data in real time as you sit there browsing. There is still a slight slowdown in browser performance but you can customize it to show only the info you need which will speed it up.

I’m packing for SES San Jose and didnt have a bunch of time to write a comprehensive review, but take my advice and download it.  It will definitly save you some time.



Here’s a screenshot

Look forward to seeing you all there!

Send me an email if you would like to meet up or if you have any inside info on “Social Networking Events”.

Jarrod@textlinkbrokers.com

We will be in town Tuesday and Wednesday.  We are leaving Thursday afternoon.

- Jarrod

360 Enterprises, Inc (Textlinkbrokers.com and several hundred other web properties) is on the prowl again.  We need a few new Top-Tier Marketing Geniuses to help us with our current expansion.  Expansion of both in-house and client projects is straining our in-house resources.

We are looking for Internet Marketing Experts who have a desire to work with some of the largest internet properties online today.

Requirements:

- At least 4 years experience in PPC and SEO.  Link Building, Web analytics experience etc… etc.. are all required.

- Ability to show past projects and successes

- Ability to be a team leader

- Ability to work on-site (Phoenix, Arizona) part-time or full-time, or to provide a full-time local liason.  Exceptions may be made for the right person/team.

Contracts:

We are awarding both individual contracts on a per job basis, as well as contracts for full-time employment.  Some position may also qualify for Profit share.

How to apply:

Please send a brief overview of your experience as well as your availability to Jarrod@textlinkbrokers.com

We are only looking for the best and the brightest.  We are not currently looking for assistants or supporting staff.

Have your keyword ranking’s fallen since the last Google Update?

Has BigDaddy been a BIG pain in your butt?


There are three things that I have seen sites do wrong that have led to lost rankings in the latest Google Update.

Hello everyone,

I’m a little bummed that I’m going to be out of town for the SEO Hold’em tournament, but if any of you are going to be around, it’s a great way to meet some other “like minded” people in our industry.

http://seoblackhat.com/2006/04/27/seo-no-limit-texas-holdem-poker-tournament/

If they make this a regular thing you can count on seeing me there.

Jarrod