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

There is a theory called “The Long Tail” that noted that a relative handful of blogs have many links going into them but “the long tail” of millions of blogs have only a handful of links going into them.  It is very similar to the bowtie theory. 

This same Long Tail theory has been applied to search in that a handful of queries drive a lot of clicks to a site but in reality there are sometimes tens of thousands of other terms which actually convert at a higher rate.

In this article I explore the Long Tail of search and how analytics impact it.

There’s a cool new tool available to help you build links.  It is called PRASE and in this article I will explain why it’s good at helping find sites.

Further I’ll look at some of the other features to see if there are other uses for this tool, such as competitive intelligence gathering and deep linking opportunities.

Really, this new tool offers so much more when you begin to look at what it can do.  And that’s what I’m writing about today.

As web users become more savvy e-tailers are going to have to learn how to adapt their sites to suite many different users.

In this article I look at why segmentation is going to be so important in the new year.

There are many ways to increase content on your site, from manually creating it to purchasing software which will auto generate it for you.

While I highly recommend you stay away from anything which is automatically generated I also understand that many people don’t feel comfortable writing.

Therefore, in this article I look at another way to make your site appear as if its changing.  That is, incorporating feeds into your site to improve return visits and build your brand.

I’ve been watching this news develop for a couple years now.  So when I read today that a major game manufacture has made a deal to distribute games with ads I wasn’t terribly surprised.

What surprised me is how long it took to come to the realization that ads in games is a highly lucrative market.

In this article I look at what some of the impacts of in-game ads could be.

According to This NY Times Article Google will pay $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL.

Further, Google has “agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site.”

I saw this a couple days ago but didn’t give it much thought until an idea occurred to me.

What if Google decides, after tweaking this landing page measurement algorithm, to begin applying it to regular SERPs?  Well in this article I look at the pros and cons of such a move.

I just happened to stumble on a pretty interesting tool today.

I was trying to find a word for “People that are behind the times” for my previous blog post.  I did a couple of searches in Google without avail and eventually started scouring for a tool that did a reverse lookup on a word.  A tool where I would give the definition, and it would give me some words that matched that definition.  What I discovered was Onelook.com’s Reverse Dictionary.

Reverse Dictionaries allow you to “Describe a concept” in order to find words that match that description.

Cool Stuff, especially for all of us non-harvard graduates.

What I find the most interesting though is all of the uses for this tool.  It is actually a very smart search engine.  You would be suprized the sort of answers you could get from asking a variety of questions.  Here are some of potential applications that OneLook describes:

- Find a word, when you know its definition, [or a portion of the definition].
- Explore related concepts. Baseball, clouds, cities.
- Generate a list of words in some category.  I.E. Large Birds, Green fruit, Canadian authors.
- Answer basic indentification questions.  What is the capital of Vietnam, Who is big birds friend on Sesame Street. What is the longest River in the world

In actuality Onelook is indexing much more then just dictionaries to find these answers.  They index encyclopedia’s and other reference sites as well.

I dont know about you guys, but if I had a very large amount of money, I might consider trying to buy their technology.  There are a lot of times I wish the major search engines could do some of the stuff that they are.  Ask.com (askjeeves) does some of this, but you cant get lists from Ask, its usually websites that come up that require you to sift through several pages to find your answers.

For all of you content mongers out there, this sort of technology could feed some very interesting sites.

I would love to see some sort of API.

http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml

Rand Fishkin (Randfish) over at seomoz.org recently published an interview with the MSN Web Search Team.  Rand collected 30 Questions that SEO professionals had come up with from a prior thread on SEOchat and forwarded them to the MSN WST.

It is a great read and one of the things I found very interesting was the questions that received a “no comment” from MSN.  It’s what you would expect when an SEO is interviewing a search engine, but what was interesting was the specific questions that they decided to not comment on.  Sometimes much more can be said with a “no comment” then could ever be said with an actual answer.  Of course, the only problem with non-answers is that it leaves it open to imagination, and we all know the kind of imagination that some SEO’s have.

There are also some great Q & A’s on linking. 

And for those of you Laggard’s that think MSN is’nt worth knowing about, I say “wake up and smell the coffee”.  MSN is doing all the things that the other engines are doing.  Understanding one of them will give insights into the future of all of them.

http://www.seomoz.org/articles/community-questions-to-msn-search.php

A recent study by a company called Pheedo shows that not only is it possible to monetize your RSS feeds, but there is also a preferred method to increase return.

In this article I look at the study to show you what you need to do to monetize your feed.

I have’nt seen something so funny in a while (or maybe I just don’t get out enough).  I was over on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog and he mentioned the “spread firefox” project when referring to the number of people currently using firefox. 

I hadnt been to that site in a while, so I took a little stroll over.  When I got there I noticed their newest program for spreading the Firefox word.  It’s called Firefox Flicks.

Firefox Flicks allows you to quickly add a video testimonial about how much you like Firefox, or whatever you want, onto a map of the earth that is scrollable similar to Google maps.

You would have to go to an SES after hours party to see as many computer geeks attempting to be funny.  I mean that in the best of ways :)

It really is a lot of great fun, makes me wish I had a webcam hooked up to my laptop.

Be sure to check out “Da Reaper”, his was the best of the ones I saw.

http://video2.spreadfirefox.com/

"Struck The Sponsored Links Nerve, Did I?”, says Jeremy Zawodny(Yahoo employee and owner of a very popular blog)in his recently published article on Webpronews talking about all of the hub bub everyone is making over him starting to sell text links on his website.

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/blogtalk/wpn-58-20051214StrucktheSponsoredLinksNerveDidI.html

Jarrod at TextLinkBrokers.com (hadn’t heard of them until today) says that there’s lots of excitement over this. It’s too bad that he didn’t say more, since he’s clearly got an insider’s viewpoint.

This is definitly an article worth reading.

Jeremy, if you are interested in knowing a veteran’s viewpoint, let me know.  I would be happy to do an interview for you!. Although it may take several to tell the whole story:)

Your an excellent writer by the way, your site is on my list now.

Despite all the hubub about Jeremy Zawodny selling text links on his site there was a noteworthy item that happened recently.  One that I think will change the way search engines operate.

Alexa recently offered it’s services for hire.  You can now hire the crawler to go index, pay to have the index sliced and even pay to host your own search service.

In this article I’m going to look at the impacts this could have on the web.

The geek in me cant help but get excited at the thought of the million possibilities for using Alexa’s new Web Search Platform. 

http://websearch.alexa.com

Some good readings:

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/4999
http://battellemedia.com/archives/002116.php

I really wish all of our current programmers werent overwhelmed with work..  If any of you have any extra programmer time, let me know.  I wouldnt mind taking this thing out for a spin.

I thought a post on searchenginewatch’s forums was very interesting.  While I haven’t yet tried it it does seem to have merit.  It talks about using subdomains from an existing site to help kick a new domain into the index and out of the “sandbox.”

In this article I explain what this technique is and how to use it.

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5002

For those of you who dont know who Jeremy Zawodny is, he is a Yahoo employee who has a very popular blog online.

He has recently started selling sponsered links on his blog.  Lots of excitement over it.

Hello fellow webmasters, link builders, and Search Engine Marketers.

I have been speaking to one of my partners, Troy Ireland, about offering a couple of free 1 hour website evaluations to some of our customers.  Troy and I occasionally conference in with some of our larger customers in order to provide training.  We love doing it as it is both educational for the customer and a great time for him and I, as we both get a kick out of talking about anything related to marketing.

We have been talking about doing a weekly, or monthly webcast where we take one of our customers and spend 30 minutes to an hour speaking with them about their online marketing strategies.  We would then offer a recording of that conference call to everyone on our site for free.  I am posting this on our blog to try and find a couple of good candidates and to guage interest.

I havent said too much about Troy on our site yet, but a brief introduction here would be good. Without sounding too wish-washy, I can honestly say that Troy is one of the most brilliant businessmen I have ever met.  He is especially savvy about all things ‘internet’.  He is one of the few people I have met that can speak for hours about Internet Marketing without missing a beat.

Before we merged our companies about 6 months ago he had quite the run as an entrepeneur.  He is a very well known SEO in the WSI network, which for those of you who dont know, is the largest Webmaster Franchise Company in the world with thousands of franchises in something like 40 countries. Because of some of his acheivements he was named the 2003 Businessman of the Year by the National Republican Congressional Committee’s Small Business Advisory Council, and that is just one of his notable acheivements.  Heres an article about him http://www.franchising.com/wsi/wsipr1.shtml He also has an MBA in International Business.

For those of you who dont know me, I picked up most of my knowledge of web marketing and development through several businesses I have successfully ran online of over the past 9 years or so.  Textlinkbrokers being one of my biggest successes and one of my greatest teachers. Through all of the wonderful companies I have worked with over the years, through TLB, I have learned a ton about what it takes to be successful online.  My companies have grown right along side those of my customers, and it has been a wonderful experience.

Anyways, Its very educational to say the least, to get the two of us on the phone together.

If any of you would be interested in having us work with you as part of one of our webcast, please let me know via email (jarrod@textlinkbrokers.com) or through this blog. Please give me as much information as you can about your online business. The perfect candidate would be someone who has a solid online business model, but just doesnt have the years of experience necessary to build a conprehensive online marketing strategy. We will not try and sell you on using our services, but instead will try and explain to you what it is that you need.  Many of the strategies we will talk about correspond with services we offer, but selling our services is not the main focus of this call, it is to educate our customers and website visitors on how to be successful.  It is the least we can do for all of the great things that our customers have done for us over the years, plus like I said before, it is just fun to do.

Choa!

Sometimes there is an advantage to hiring a smaller SEO firm.  This is because in some cases the firms that only do consulting lose sight of the details.  This is because they have forgotten how to take care of the details.

In this article I explain why you need to keep focus on those details and how you can do it, especially if you are one of those SEO “consultants.”

Hello Fellow Link builders,

I’m sure a lot of you had heard the news that Yahoo was building a system to allow people to easily gather both inbound link and indexed page data, but it wasnt until today that I actually searched for it, found it, and used it.  And I have to tell you I am extremly impressed. They even include an api for using the information in our tools. Kudos to you Yahoo. 

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

If you havent been there yet, go there now.  If you like the Google backlink command you are going to love using Site Explorer.

As of today Textlinkbrokers has 11,416 pages indexed and 84,729 backlinks.

It would be awesome if someone built a Firefox extension to access this great tool.  If someone knows of one, let me know.

Hello Fellow Link builders,

Textlinkbrokers is looking for a few additional link building experts to add to our ever growing staff.

With our link building management services being so popular we have the need to hire additional link building experts/assistants on a contract, part-time, or full-time basis.

These link builders will work directly under me and will be trained on advanced link building techniques.

Your main job will consist of developing both direct and passive link building strategies, identifying authority link partners, assisting in link aquisition etc etc..

I look forward to hearing from you.  I can be reached at Jarrod@Textlinkbrokers.com

Randfish over at Seomoz.org has released a very well written FREE guide to beginner SEO.  I skimmed through most of it and was pleased to find that he covers a wide range of important topics.

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php

I’ve been actively researching ways to quickly and effectively build content to websites.  And while blogs tend to be near the top of the list, there are other opportunities out there.

One such opportunity is a Wiki.  And while a Wiki won’t suit all sites, there are those which can use a Wiki effectively.  If you think you are one of those sites, take a look at this article.

Having been in this industry for as long as I have, I often forget some of the basics. Well, it’s not that I forget, it’s just that I assume that everyone else in the industry has the same knowledge level as I do.

So when I get a “newbie” asking a question like “Why are my Google results different than my clients” I have to take a step back and realize that we aren’t all equal.

Therefore in this article I’m going to answer this one seemingly simple question.  While it may be simple to those of us “in the know” this isn’t always the case with others.

In looking forward into next year there are certain things we can be sure of.  That the engines will continue to improve their algorithms and that new tools will be added to the SEO/SEM toolkit.

In this article I look at one of those tools as well as some of the potential drawbacks to the new medium.

With all this talk about the Trustbox, Sandbox and Trustrank many times we get overwhelmed.  One begins to wonder just how they go about building all these links from high quality authority websites.

In this article I look at one such tactic. One that may surprise you at how effective it is yet one that is sure to drive large volumes of quality links to the site in question.

Hello All,

Im doing a little research into BPM systems.  We are a process-centric business, unfortunatly our in-house process management software is much in need of an overhaul.  I have 3 of my experienced programmers working full-time on a new system, but after months of intense planning, we are just now starting to build it, which means we are months away from completion.

So, In the mean time I’m spending some of my time to further research current solutions that are out there and thought it would be a good idea to ask you guys for any experiences you may have had.

The problem with the BPM software solutions that are out there is that it they tend to be fairly expensive, and unless you have an experienced programming team and a good understanding of process management, it can be very tough and expensive to build your own system. Yet, process management is one of those things that almost every business can benefit from. 

We are building our software to be very flexible and platform independent.  One plan is to offer the software to other small to medium size businesses on a per user web based service model.

We are also looking for partnerships with other companies to share some of the cost of development.  We have spent nearly 6 months blueprinting the software out and have included just abut every feature imaginable, along with making it extremly flexible and easy to maintain.  Flexibility is the key to any process management software.  It is critical to be able to change or build new processes very quickly, and the user interfaces have to be very robust and easily configurable.  It is also important that it be platform independent and able to connect to any data source; having access to all of your data (customer, inventory, accounting, billing, sales, fulfillment, etc) is the key to any BPM system.

If there are any of you interested in this sort of system, I would love to speak about ways we can share some of the cost in developing it in exchange for access to use the program.  The way I see it, if a few of us pool together, we can get it built faster, with more features and with less cost.  I am also entertaining the idea of taking on investors.

Here are some of the solutions currently available.  For those of you with an IT background you will notice that most of them are built with open standards, which is exactly what we are striving for.

http://www.fuego.com/product_fact.html

http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm (opensource, java, j2ee)

http://www.adeptia.com/ (http://www.adeptia.com/data_integration/data_integration.html)

http://www.global360.com/solutions/bpm/

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/04/40NNbluecode_1.html

http://www.seagullsoftware.com/products/bpm.html?gclid=CIPawOvJ4oECFQLISAodzD4WrA

There seems to be a new term emerging around the whole sandbox/trustrank issue.  In this article I look at that new term and discuss it’s implications in the SEO field.

The new term is “Trustbox” and I think it quite neatly summarizes the effect we’re seeing on Google now.

This is Part 2 of 2 on a topic I came across at cre8asiteforums.com that opens the doors to discussion on some popular SEO myths.

In this article I look at the remaining “myths” to give you my take on these issues.