My objective in using these tools is, of course, building links, so I’ll go over the tools that I use and show you how I’d use them. And hey, they’re all free!!

For the record, I’m not interested in competitive analysis, analyzing sites, using social media (with one notable exception, and my exclusion here is only because that topic has been well covered both on this site and elsewhere) or examining existing backlinks. I’m interested in using these tools to help with finding new link sources and creating new content.

Also note, we don’t automate anything that we do. I know that we could (and probably should) but these are all tools that we use having that mindset. When we send out link requests, they’re usually pretty targeted so we spend lots of time upfront finding those sites. We aren’t interested in copying anyone’s link profile.

Our main timesuck is definitely discovery so any time I can find a cool tool to help with that, I love it. If you’re lucky enough to get things done through lots of automation, then I’m jealous, but if not, hopefully some of these tools can help you a bit.

For Link Outreach Generation

As much as I would love to totally streamline how we build contacts, I have not yet found a method that works for my link builders due to the way that we build links (it’s a bit old-school.) However, Buzzstream’s Blogroll List Builder is the closest thing I’ve found to being something that will work well for us.

It’s a very cool little tool that accepts a list of blog URLs and returns a downloadable list of blogroll links on those sites. If you have a good, relevant list of blogs to start with, this could definitely lead you to some cool sites and save time.

You still have to do your homework or you’ll be inundated with irrelevant sites, but this one is seriously promising.

For Search Term Discovery & Content Ideas

We have multiple clients and around 20 link builders/content team members so when it comes to discovery, we use many different methods. Some link builders prefer to just crawl around in the SERPs. Some like to sit down with a group and brainstorm.

However, the following tools are ones that we have found to be very useful in triggering new ideas for Google searches, anchor texts, guest posts, and new content for the sites we work on.

I’ve been using Wordtracker for a decade it seems. The Keyword Questions tool is really nice because once you enter your search phrase, it gives you a list of the questions people are asking about that topic and tells you how many times the questions were asked. This is great for helping you figure out what people want to know so that you can write about it.

After you do one search, you are asked to register but hey, it’s for a free account! You get 20 searches for the month so choose them carefully.

The Solo SEO Link Search Tool remains one of my favorites, as when you’re building links all day and you’re just dead tired, this tool makes more searches so easy. Just enter a phrase and it generates a list of more advanced search terms that link straight to the results in the engine that you select.

Pinterest: yes, it’s the latest fad and it can be a massive time waster, but if you use it correctly, you can get tons of great ideas for content. For those of us who like visuals, this has serious potential. If you choose to see what Everyone is pinning, you can drill down into more relevant categories.

Let’s say that I’m building links for a gardening site, so I’ll see what’s being pinned in Gardening. I see a ton of pins about seed bombs, which have interested me for awhile but we haven’t (theoretically) yet written about them on this imaginary gardening blog. Since 5 pins are different seed bomb photos that I see above the fold, this is a pretty good bet for me for my next post that will hopefully generate some links. I might also do some discovery for seed bombs to see if I can find good link targets.

Uber Suggest is powered by Google Suggest. You can select the language you want, whether you want to search the Web, news, or products, and get a downloadable text file. If you click on a result, you get deeper results and it’s all nicely alphabetized. This is great for discovery ideas for both pursuing link targets and generating ideas for guest posts and content.

Touch Graph allows you to visualize related topics. You put in a topic and it returns all kinds of related data such as phrases used for related searches and domains that are related. I think it’s especially good for tangential relevance (where something is related to something else in an indirect manner.) You can click on a graphed result and get related information for it, so the potential for drilling down here is fantastic.

Google’s BlogSearch can be particularly good for finding blogs so you can keep an eye on the homepage in case a new and relevant post pops up where you could get a link. If you’re using Google alerts, you might even set some up for the blogs that you see there.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is great for finding new keywords to use in search. I always come back to this one because I also do a bit of PPC for a client.

Soovle is getting a lot of attention and it should. You can get search results from Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Yahoo, Youtube, and Bing. Each result is linkable to the original source.

There’s also a link to the top daily internet keywords that’s alphabetized. This is fantastic for giving you ideas for popular searches you can use for discovery or writing content. There are also some “secrets” that are too numerous to include here but if you use this, check them out and see if they help. You can also choose different engines/sites to use for your search and customize this tool further for your needs, which is really nice.

In order to not rehash all I’ve said about free alerts I’ll suggest that you read an earlier post about that as it’s something that I highly recommend for keeping abreast on new potential link targets. It’s also a great way to see what your competitors are doing in case you’re missing a great opportunity.

Just for the record, this is a very small list of tools (that we’ve tested and like) that could work for you (for a bigger one look here). If you have something that you love that is free and useful for discovery, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

What will happen if your site gets penalized, banned, hacked, or is cursed with loads of downtime? Sure, PPC is great for this, but what about everything else?

“Ranking” well in other arenas can be a key way of soldiering on until your problem has been fixed. It can also open up some great avenues that lead to new conversions.

Before you build links to all these non-main-site properties though, you need to actually do the same thing you’d do for your site: build up a great presence that’s actually worthy of generating links. Link to these “others” from your main site, and link to your main site from them.

Rank Without Your Site

Does your Facebook page show up in the SERPs when a search for your brand is conducted? If you have one, it probably does, but let’s take that idea and extrapolate it to something a bit more complex. Facebook pages rank well, as we know, so just the act of having one usually means it’s going to show up for your brand. What about for keywords though?

Just so we all remember that there are more great sites than Facebook, let’s take a look at another example. For a search on “Greensboro tree service” I see relevant local results from the following sites listed:

• Yellow Pages
• Google Places
• Google Maps
• Better Business Bureau
• Service Magic (a directory site)

In fact, in the top 10 for this search, if you ignore the local results that show, 3 out of 10 results are from sites that are not actual tree service sites. That equates to 3 out of 10 chances to rank without your site, in other words.

Write Something Somewhere Else (Like I’m Doing Here!)

My agency doesn’t have a work blog because I write for other sites and don’t honestly think that I have all that much to say without repeating myself on my own site. When we started the SEO Chicks blog, several people expressed concern that I was building visibility for something that wasn’t only my own, but then that led to other opportunities.

It led to links, to personal rankings, and to the chance to connect with a wider audience. If you can only have a few listings ranking for your site, why not try and rank other pieces of your work and fill up the SERPs? If you do this properly, you can get great results for your personal brand, your company brand, or your target keywords.

Let’s take the lovely Debra Mastaler as an example here, since she writes for this site and has some great other authority rankings in the top 10 for her name:

In a name search for Debra, you get her sites (new and old), her Twitter profile, author and speaker profiles, and an interview with an industry site. In this case, 6 out of 10 results are from sites that don’t specifically belong to her.

These sites contain links to Debra’s company sites of course, so they’ve been great for link building for traffic most importantly. Debra’s company ranks number 1 for her name, but mine does not, as you can see here:

In fact, most of my business does not come from my actual website (and since it’s an outdated and somewhat crappy site, I’m not complaining.) Most of it comes through referrals from other SEOs, the articles that I write, or interviews that I’ve done.

My site doesn’t rank well for a lot of key terms for my industry but my name pops up as the author of several articles written about link building. Those articles drive quality traffic to me, whether it’s through an author contact form or my actual website.

Brand Yourself Through Non-Site Channels

My cousin has a tire shop that has a website. He also has an awesome Facebook page for it where citizens of my tiny town actually interact. Now, if you are from such a small place, you’ll understand that being wished Happy Holidays by your tire shop employees fosters goodwill and makes you go there when you need new tires. It’s quite simple.

They promote their latest specials, they give out tips about tire pressure, etc, and they give you the info that’s usually annoyingly hard to find on regular websites (store hours, for a prime example.)

Quiksilver has an awesome YouTube brand channel. From road trips to surfing videos, they promote seriously cool content here. As of this time, they have 20,781 subscribers with 11,302,038 video views.

What I like about this is that they use YouTube for things other than selling their clothes. You may see a cool surfing video where the surfer is wearing a suit that you like so since it’s on the Quiksilver brand channel, you’ll go to the site and try to find it. It’s a great way to keep branding.

Figure Out Where Your Users Are & Be There (When They Are There!)

There are a few “when to tweet” services out there but I usually rely on Crowdbooster for this. You have to keep a few things in mind when you’re promoting content of course, with regards to when to do it.

I personally respond very, very well to Papa John’s emails about whatever special happens to be running that day, as they usually hit my inbox at the perfect time (for me with this, that is usually mid-morning when I’m starting to wonder about lunch or around 3pm when I’m struggling to figure out what the kids will eat for dinner.)

If those emails hit my inbox at 10pm, they wouldn’t be effective for me. You can check your site’s metrics to see where your traffic is coming from and make sure that you’re addressing users when they’re likely to be online.

Find out where else your target market hangs out. Competitive analyses can be very good for this so see if your competitors have a Facebook page that’s full of interaction. Are people commenting about your restaurant on Yelp? Then monitor what they say and respond.

Setting up Google alerts, Twitter alerts, and Facebook alerts should cover the majority of what’s said about you online but obviously something like a mention on a private forum that is offlimits to search engines isn’t going to find its way to you. That’s why you might need to do a bit of digging in order to unearth potentially “hidden” communities.

Rank In the Real World, Not Just The Engines

There are plenty of chances for this…conferences, smaller industry events, etc. Do people know your name, do they associate you or your brand with quality, do they reference you when someone asks “who can you recommend to do X for me?”

I live in the South in an old wooden house, so I am quite well acquainted with a local pest control company. If someone mentions seeing a spider the size of his head crawling under the bed, I’ll recommend this company. They’re always on time, the employee who comes out is able to ignore my killer bloodhound, and he’s extremely polite and efficient. Every single time. They rank in my world, so to speak.

A personal recommendation, many times, trumps what you find in the SERPs.

Remember: everyone has a preference for interaction. Some people love Facebook pages, some people can’t live without Twitter, some just want to go to your site. Some people want to read reactions from your customers and a Facebook page is usually perfect for this.

No matter what you do, your actual website isn’t going to be number one all the time. People look elsewhere for what they need so why not be there?

For our purposes here in Link Week, I’ll be reviewing the Site Explorer, Backlink History, Neighbourhood Checker, and Clique Hunter.

Basic Tool Functions

First up is the Site Explorer, which takes your URL and returns tons of information: Summary, Top Backlinks, Referring Domains, and Top Pages. Each section is represented on the results page, but you can click on the tabs and get more in-depth info if you like. You can choose the Fresh Index or the Historic Index and run the report on either the domain, the subdomain, or the page itself.

My favorite tool, the Backlink History, also shows up here in the results page but not in its own tab. Now, a note on the Fresh vs. Historic Index: the Fresh index gives you information from a rolling 30 day period and is more, um, fresh, while the Historic index gives you everything in Majestic’s history for a site.

The Domain Information gives you your Referring Domains and External Backlinks, so you can quickly tell if you have a lot of sitewides (if you have 10k backlinks and 10 referring domains, yes, you have a lot of sitewides.)

Your backlinks and referring domains are broken down into educational and governmental and the following information is displayed: Referring IP Addresses, Class C Subnets, Indexed URLs, Images, Nofollow Links, Redirects, Frames, and Deleted Links. You’ll also see a number called the Majestic Million which is a list of the top one million domains as rated by Majestic SEO.

The Backlink History shows your 2 charts: 1 is your external backlinks discovery over the past 12 months and the other is your referring domains discovery over the past 12 months. You can click on these two charts in order to go directly to the Backlink History tool and get more information.

The Top Backlinks area shows the Source URL, Anchor Text, Target URL, and Last Crawl Date.

The Referring Domains area lists the top domains that link to your URL.

The Top Pages area lists your top pages: Title, URL, AC Rank (which is a measure of how important a page is based on the number of unique referring external root domains), Date, External Backlinks, and Referring Domains.

How To Interpret The Link Data

This is a wealth of information for analyzing a backlink profile. If you’re analyzing your own site, I see numerous uses:

• Identifying the top pages that link to you and making sure these links stay up. It’s tricky to watch all your backlinks if you have a lot of them, but if you’re too overwhelmed, just identify the top ones and track those.

• Identifying your site’s top pages so that you can continue to build good links to these in particular (and go through your site to ensure that your top pages link to other pages that you think are critical but aren’t viewed as top ones just yet.)

• Identifying pages of lower importance so that you can work on their content in hopes of generating more backlinks.

For competitive analysis, this information can easily be used to see where you stand compared to others in your niche.

For potential link partners, use this data to identify the top pages on a site and go after a link on that page. With so much information, there are truly countless ways of using this data to help better your link building efforts.

Note: I’d love to include a screenshot here but the information you get takes up a large amount of space and I don’t think I can do it justice. Since you can see the Site Explorer for free, even if you can’t get all the detailed data, I’d suggest checking it out for yourself.

Next up is the Backlink History, which has been something I have relied upon many times (especially when clients are trying to convince me that they know their competitors aren’t matching/beating their own link building efforts.) You can again use either the fresh or historic index here and you can compare up to five domains. Currently, subdomains are ignored.

This tool shows backlink discovery by month, so let’s get a screenshot of a few SEO sites to compare (Disclaimer: I write for the three sites used here):

What you see here is the default view, which is a set of two graphs: backlinks discovery and referring domains discovery in non-cumulative view.

You can view the charts in Monthly, Cumulative, or Normalized forms, see them as a Spline, Line, Column or Area chart, and choose whether you want to see data from 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, or all time.

Majestic SEO advises that you use the Normalized view and/or compare domains in order to get the most comparable data down at the bottom of the page. In these charts, you’ll see how you compare to your competitors.

It’s interesting to compare the two charts as well because of the difference in referring domains and backlinks discovery (and for those of you who are new to link building concepts, referring domains would show a value of 1 even if there were 150 links to a site on that same site, but it would show a value of 150 if you were looking at backlinks.)

According to the chart in the screenshot, Search Engine Land has traditionally built more backlinks than the other two but the referring domains numbers between SEL and Search Engine Journal are quite close. (Poor SEO Chicks.) This would make me suspect that Search Engine Land is generating more instances of multiple links on the same domain. In any case, this is a seriously great tool to use to see how your backlinks/referring domains compare with others.

Now we’ll turn to the Neighbourhood Checker, which accepts either a domain or an IP address. As usual, you can choose either fresh or historic data. This tool shows you the most backlinked domains hosted on any IP or subnet so that you can get a better idea of potentially dangerous cohosted sites.

When you enter your site or IP, you get two lists: one that shows what is cohosted on your IP, and one that shows what is cohosted on your subnet. Here’s an edited screenshot, as I don’t want to rile anyone up:

The data shown lets you check the site out by visiting it, going to the Site Explorer, or seeing its Backlink History, so checking out what’s cohosted is pretty simple. You’re shown the location of the IP, referring domains, and external backlinks to each domain listed.

I would recommend using this tool in conjunction with others that give you a fuller picture, of course, since with the rise in spammy sites over the past decade, it’s truly difficult to run a report like this and not find something that might seem a bit dangerous at first glance. There are many ways in which this data could be interpreted, so I’ll leave that up to you.

Last but not least is the Clique Hunter which allows you to enter up to ten unique root domains (with a minimum of two) and shows you a representation of the main sites that link to the sites you’ve entered, therefore identifying your cliques.

The thickness of the line indicates that more links come from that domain to the domain it points to, so as you can see in the screenshot below, there are lots of links on blogspots that point to Search Engine Land.

Further down, you can better filter your results by increasing your minimum number of matches, number of results shown, and the depth of analysis. You can then sort the data by about a dozen metrics, ascending or descending, then sort further (like you’d do with a spreadsheet.)

You’ll see a list of domains along with the number of linked domains to those sites, matches, Alexa rank, and numbers for your queried domains. For each domain listed, you can visit the site, view the backlink history, see it in Site Explorer, or create an exportable CSV report. There are also links at the bottom that will allow you to view the queried domains in summary form on the Bulk Backlink Checker and the Backlink History.

Interestingly, this tool was inspired by Aaron Wall’s Hub Finder (my favorite of his set.) Just as with the Site Explorer, there is a multitude of great information here and I can see tons of ways to use it for link building but the main one is simple:

Identify the sites that link to your competitors but not to you, yet. Pursue links on those sites.

It’s worth mentioning that Majestic has a cool plugin that works in either IE (gasp) or Firefox. It lists Majestic SEO as one of your search engines so you can simply choose it and go to the Site Explorer page for a site.

Link Tool Takeaways

So there you have it…another amazing suite of tools that can ramp up your link building efforts, complete with a blog, video tutorials, and a constantly updated index.

Overall, Majestic is extremely easy to use and is quite intuitive, so even for a true beginner, I can’t see these tools being overwhelming. The amount of data could potentially overwhelm someone but honestly, that’s not a bad thing in my opinion. I’d rather have more than less. With the different packages available, even a small or solo operation would be well-advised to use this system.

Majestic also has a great blog that is searchable and contains posts about latest updates, along with tons of training posts and videos. If you can’t figure out how to use one of their tools, it’s not for their lack of trying. I actually found it all quite straightforward and intuitive though, and even for a novice tool user, I don’t think you’ll be stumped.

Finally, there is the API: I did not test this but it’s worth noting as it enables you to access key functions and gives you a development area where you can test applications without affecting your subscription resources (which include set numbers of reports you can run a month, for example.)

While we’re on the subject of reports, there are two types: standard and advanced. All subscription plans provide access to standard reports, which can be run for any website. A standard report gives you what Majestic believes is the key set of information including an overview, backlinks information, and anchor text information. Advanced reports gives you absolutely everything you could possibly want to know about a domain. These reports are also downloadable so that you can further analyze the data.

To sum it up, this is a massively powerful set of tools if you’re interested in link building. It’s intuitive, fast, and due to the different tiers of pricing, there’s an option for everyone. If you need less link-focused tools this may not be the suite for you, because there are no rank checkers or code validators, but for link building, it’s seriously top notch.

If you click on the SEO Tools link on the topnav, you’ll see a list of both free and paid tools. However, other pages on the site did lead me to a few other tools not specifically listed there, so I’ll do my best to give you a comprehensive list of what’s out there with regards to link building tools, since that’s the focus of this review.

Listed on the nav bar, we have the following tools that I have reviewed for link building purposes:

• Local Rank
• Hub Finder
• Competitive Research

Other particularly interesting public link tools I found through digging on the site include:

• Link Harvester
• Link Suggestion Tool
• Link Popularity Comparison Tool

There are also free Firefox add-ons (SEO for Firefox is included in this review), keyword tools, analytics tools, PPC tools, a rank checker, a site health check, and more. That’s one thing that makes this suite of tools so valuable; you don’t get tools that are only built for one aspect of marketing.

SEO For Firefox Plugin

First up is the free plugin SEO for Firefox. The SEO for Firefox plugin is truly one of the most indispensable tools out there in my opinion. All of my link builders use it and it’s my go-to quick analysis tool.

PageRank is the only thing that is automatically pulled into the tool, so if you want other metrics, you’ll have to customize it. There is some very helpful advice from Aaron about how to configure the extension to use the least resources so I’d highly recommend reading his instructions.

This extension can easily be turned on and off so that it’s not running nonstop, which I really like. Firefox is slow enough. Obviously, there is a lot of link data here. Metrics are as follows (listed in as small a space as possible since there are so many):

PR, Google Cache Date, Traffic Value, Age, del.icio.us, del.icio.us Page Bookmarks, Diggs, Diggs Popular Stories, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Y! links, Y! edu links, Y! gov links, Y! Page links, Y! edu page links, OSE links to page, OSE links to domain, Blekko domainlinks, Technorati, Alexa, Compete.com rank,, Compete.com uniques, Cached, Dmoz, Bloglines, Page blog links, wikipedia, dir.yahoo.com, BOTW, Business, Majestic SEO linkdomain

You can doubleclick a metric in the popup window and be taken to the source for further digging. I didn’t get data for many of the metrics, however, but issues like this are discussed in the instructions, as some of the data sources might not always be reliably pingable.

You can use SEO for Firefox as an on-demand service, like I do (which means that you can easily just rightclick, go to SEO for Firefox, and look up the page) or you can run it all the time and you’ll see the data at the bottom of the SERPs like this:

Again, the data you see is clickable and leads you to the source for more information.

Another handy part of this tool is that you can highlight nofollow links and external links and see images’ alt attributes through SEO XRay, which is a feature on the extension that gives you even more cool information such as is seen in the following screenshot:

How would you use this to help build links?

For starters, it tells you just about everything you need to know about a site that you’re thinking about getting a link on, and it’s a great way to do some competitive analysis. It’s not a tool to show you where to build links, but it’s a great analysis tool to firm up your decision.

As always though, don’t let metrics alone be the deciding factor in whether or not to pursue a link. Some sites may show low metrics for certain things (like the dreaded PageRank) so use caution when evaluating a site strictly by numbers.

Pros

• I love the on-the-fly capability of this, as I hate running tools that slow down my browser.
• I like that you can either see the desired data by clicking and grabbing it on the page, or by viewing it in the SERPs.
• For a quick overview on a site, I don’t know of anything that I find more useful.

Cons

• If you aren’t using Firefox, you’re out of luck.
• Not all of the data sources return information all the time.

Local Rank

Next we have Local Rank. Local Rank is a Member’s Only tool. The tool runs on the premise that sites that are well linked to from top results might get a rankings boost in Google for certain keywords.

Fields are as follows:

• The Keyword field is where you enter the keyword…pretty self-explanatory.
• The Scan First (x) Results lets you choose from the default 100 to 1000 results. This tells the tool how many results to scan.
• The Find LocalRank links pointing at the top search results field lets you choose from the default 10 to 50 results and tells the tool how many top results to find links to.
• The Region/Country field lets you choose where you want your query to be run, with Google.com as the default. From what I can tell, there are choices for just about every country-specific Google.

When you submit your query, you’ll see results like the following:

The tool lists the URLs found for the initial query along with crawl dates and both Yahoo and Majestic link counts.

It then uses a re-ranking algorithm to identify a list of sites that have are frequently cited from those sites. These are your likely link targets and they’re listed in the matrix below the initial results set. There is also a link to the Competitive Research Tool which is quite handy, and the matrix can be exported.

Here’s a screenshot:

Each URL has associated numbers running across the top, along with checkmarks that indicate that the site to the right of it is linking to the site at the top of the matrix. (Note: I did have to ask Aaron to clarify this one.)

Pros

• The Yahoo and Majestic link count data is pretty cool and takes you to the source in case you want to do any extra digging.

Cons

• While I was able to see the Yahoo data from the links in the results listed above the matrix, all of the non-URL results that I clicked on in the results matrix sent me to a Yahoo site explorer page with no results.

Competitive Research Tool

Now we’ll turn to the Competitive Research module which is a tool that’s only available to members. Enter in a URL or keyword, choose a datacenter, and you’re provided with competitive information including organic and pay per click.

Since I also do PPC work, this is a particularly cool tool for me because I could use it to help make recommendations about where to put the marketing efforts.

If you put in a URL you’ll just get data for that one in particular, and if you input a keyword, you’ll see a list of URLs along with corresponding numbers but the results available are a bit different, so it’s worth playing around with, using both URLs and keywords, in order to get a full picture.

You can either enter a URL or a keyword for this one. For the first example, I’ve entered the keyword “umbrellas” as it’s looking a bit rainy outside today. You need to make sure to hit the Keyword button of course (and obviously the Domain button if you’re entering a URL) and then choose a Google datacenter.

The keyword report shows you CPC, Competition, and Ave. Volume for your keyword and several related ones.

To get even more specific domain-related information, choose the Domain option. For this example I’ll use the New York Times since they are a well-known site and certainly can’t complain about being outed anywhere for anything.

Here you’ll see the following: Domain, Rank, Organic Keywords, Organic Traffic, Organic Cost, Adwords Keywords, Adwords Traffic, and Adwords Costs for the domain summary itself.

Next, you’ll see the following for fields for keyword-specific organic data: Keyword, Pos, Traffic %, Costs %, Costs CPC, Volume, Total Keyword value, Value of #1 Ranking, Current Position Value, Upside Potential, Upside Potential %, and URL. That’s a plethora of great data.

The data doesn’t stop here, however.

We also get tons of Adwords-specific information about the keywords (and quite honestly, I will just bore you if I continue to list all the fields so suffice it to say, you’ll be buried under information here), along with competitors’ information (again in both organic and Adwords-specific formats), then Potential Ads/Traffic Buyers listed in both Organic to Adwords Competition and Potential Ads/Traffic Sellers listed in both Organic to Adwords Competition.

Wow. For all of the sets of data, you have the option to get even more information. This tool alone could take up an entire review and I doubt I’d still cover it all.

So how would you use this for link building?

Tons of ways, I’m sure – but I’ll cover just a few ways I’d use the data.

1.  Just as it’s good to use organic data in conjunction with PPC data in order to maximize your outlay and resources, it’s good to use both of these to help decide where to hit links the hardest. By showing you what your URL ranks for in Google alongside the traffic percent and cost per click of that keyword, you can decide which anchors to go after.

2.  By using a keyword, you can see a list of related competing keywords alongside their cost per click and current value. Depending upon my budget, I’d make decisions on where to spend the most money to get the best results.

3.  Figure out how your competitors are doing in organic and paid search in order to better tailor your link efforts.

Pros

• This data is fantastic and the tool is easy to use. I love that it combines PPC and organic in a way that is applicable to link building. Usually, you don’t get that in one tool.
• The report runs quite quickly which is always nice.
• I like that you can either do this by keyword or by domain, depending upon your needs.

Cons

• Honestly, I can’t think of any, unless you happen to be a person who hates great data.

Hub Finder

The Hub Finder is another member’s only tool that finds instances of co-occurring links. It runs on the premise that a site that links out to several competitors in the same field should have editorial integrity and be willing to link to you as well. You can plug in between two and ten of your competitors in order to identify sites that link to as many of them as you specify.

So let’s get started with the fields and what to do with each one. Straightforward for many of you, but I’m such a literalist that I did have to ask Aaron a few questions in order to understand what to do with two of the fields.

• The Subject can be used to pull a list of relevant sites to query from either Google or Yahoo. You can also just enter your own URLs.
• The Results field is a dropdown list of 1 to a default value of 20 that simply specifies how many results you’d like to see when you run the tool.
• The API field is used to specify whether you want to use the API or Yahoo, Google, or both of them at the same time.
• Min Match tells the tool how many minimum matches to show, meaning that if you want to only see sites that link to all 5 of your competitors, you’d choose 5. If you wanted to see sites that linked to just 2 of your 10 competitors, you’d choose 2. Nice and straightforward stuff, even for me.
• The Depth field is used to specify how many top inbound links you want to search through for each domain, ranging from the default of 50 to 250.
• The optional Include This Site field is one that I did have to ask about, as I wasn’t sure what the purpose was. The answer made perfect sense: this field is used to force the inclusion of one URL in particular. I’ll share Aaron’s example here:

“an example…a site competing against one of my sites rebranded to a new URL. so I found links to them that were on any page that had links to other top sites in that vertical. figuring some of those are resources pages that might be willing to list more sites in the niche, I can then manually contact them & let them know about the updated link or broken link or whatever & then also pitch the link I want promoted as well.”

• The Link Type field is used to select either Domain or Page values.
• The Application field is used to select either Sort By or Must Link. Options are Sort By and Must Link.

So let’s get started, using a nice SEO example with the major SEO sites listed, forcing the include for the SEO Chicks site.

The results are mapped with a number corresponding to each competing URL, along with Xs that denote which sites have co-occuring links. There’s a highlight function that is activated if you click on one of the numbers that denotes a URL so you can more easily see specific instances of co-occurrences.

The results set also contains links to the following:

• Whois (W)
• Archive.org (A)
• Google cache (H)
• DMOZ (D)
• Yahoo Directory (Y)

You’ll see the IP address for each URL and be able to click through to the sites themselves. The report is also downloadable which is always handy.

Pros

• There is a lot of documentation for the Hub Finder, which was helpful.
• I love the results report, which makes it very easy to quickly see which sites link to competing URLs but not your own.
• It uses Yahoo mainly, not Google. Hooray!
• In addition to loving the results report, I love the results, period. Finding co-occuring links is a great way to find new opportunities for your own site.
• The report is downloadable.
• The report runs quickly.

Cons

• Error checking messages are non-existent on this tool. If you do something wrong, you just won’t see results and you may not understand that it is because you have misused the tool. I had to ask a few questions in order to understand how to use this properly, even after reading the instructions. Once you understand how exactly to use it, it makes sense of course, but I do think that error messages would be helpful to users.
• Some functionality just didn’t make sense to me. For example, if you choose the default Sort By in the Application, you will see results that don’t necessarily link to the site that you may have put into the Include This Site field. If you choose the Must Link, you’ll only see results that link to that site at a minimum. To me, this is a bit confusing since I’d assume that including a site would take care of this.
• The example image used in the instructions page had a field in it that was not present in my current version.

Bottom line: I’ve used this tool before (long enough ago that I forgot how it worked, oddly enough) and always been a fan of it. I love the idea behind it and the fact that it’s a great source for new links. Error checking messages are something I seem to need due to being a bit of a clumsy user, but as I said, once you understand what to do, the tool is straightforward.

Wrapup

My favorite tool in this suite was the Hub Finder. It’s straightforward and applicable to the way I build links. I also rely upon the SEO for Firefox plugin but that’s a free tool. I could also use more error messages as I have said, due to being a bit spastic and clicking without reading things carefully.

I would probably not purchase a membership strictly for the tools. However, the forum alone is worth the price. Heck, the monthly wrapup that Aaron does is worth the price! I do keep up on what’s going on but his October wrapup, available only to members, alerted me to tons of articles that I had not seen. If you’re busy and can afford the cost, I’d become a member for that alone as it honestly did cover just about everything that happened. Participants in the forum seem to be extremely open and helpful and just in skimming a few topics, I learned a lot.

There are also training videos, tons of archived articles, downloadable strategy guides, and quick start checklists. If you’re just starting out in SEO, I’d say this program would definitely benefit you. If you’re a seasoned SEO and want to get the same kind of information that you tend to get only at bars after a conference, this is what you’re looking for.

To me, SEO and link building are inextricably linked. However, Rae’s advice was dead on because she pointed out that we were indeed charged with discussing just link building, not SEO, and there was an SEO site clinic as well. The most difficult part of the session, for me, was in staying on task with the links and ignoring all the glaring SEO errors that I saw, and that I see with sites every day.

Link building can definitely help rank a site, provided there’s enough time, money and resources. However, it’s just not enough to sustain a site.

You may be No. 1, but your site is horribly unfriendly to users, thereby losing conversions left and right. You may have been hit by recent algorithmic updates and consequently built links like crazy, only to see no results. It’s just not enough on its own anymore.

Here are the top five issues that have continually come up and affected our link building efforts:

1. Failure to properly institute server redirects

You’d be surprised to see how many websites still don’t 301 one version of their site (whether www or non-www) to the other version. This causes issues with indexation and link juice.

If you run both www and non-www versions without a 301, you’re essentially splitting the link juice, as people will link to you using both non-www and www paths. If you 301 one version and people link to the nonpreferred URL, you’re still getting the link juice benefit through the 301, so make sure you pick one or the other.

2. Internal link structure

From not using good anchors internally to wasting nav space on lower-quality pages, suboptimal internal link structure is one of the most common problems I encounter when reviewing a site. It’s a rare site that actually needs to link to 100 equally important pages from the homepage, but you wouldn’t know it to look at some sites.

I’ve seen that especially with e-commerce sites that sell niche items. It’s great that you have 100 types of products, but there’s a better way to get a user there than by having them all in a leftnav.

Additionally, I see lots of people wasting opportunities for good anchor text internally. If you’re linking to your metal posters page with the anchor “Ripped!” then you’re also potentially confusing users and squandering conversions.

3. Not making additional important features obvious to users

If you have a Twitter account, list it on the home page. The same goes for Facebook. I’ve looked at several sites recently and while they do have social media accounts, you’d never know it unless you happened to search for it.

The same holds true for a company blog, a YouTube channel, or anything else that will flesh out your online presence and give users more content and more opportunities to interact with you in different ways. Let people know where else you hang out.

4. Not using 404s properly

Different people like to handle 404s in different way. My agency just sends any page-not-found request back to the home page. Hey, so does The Onion!!

I thought this was the easiest route to take, but my preference would probably be a custom 404 scenario that did the whole “were you maybe looking for this instead?” list of URLs based on a semantic analysis of what was typed, along with a handy site search box and all old pages/potentially-mistyped-paths 301′d. I can dream can’t I?

Some people use very creative 404 pages. Some people 301 the heck out of every possible error URL you could dream up. The key is, indeed, to handle 404s and not just leave a user hanging.

If you have any links going to pages that are no longer found on your website and you aren’t handling this, that’s obviously a bad user experience — which leads to fewer conversions — so ideally you should make sure you 301 any old URLs that have inbound links.

If you only do a pretty 404 page, make sure that it contains a link to your home page at the very least, so you’ll still provide a better user experience.

Bad!

Good!

For more about how to handle this, last week’s Link Week column on how to capture broken inbound links is a fantastic resource.

5. Robots.txt issues

Some sites have loads of PDFs, Excel files, etc., and they don’t really need to be polluting the SERPs. Before you block those pages though, see if they rank! If they’re driving relevant traffic to your site, I wouldn’t block them. If they don’t rank and aren’t anything you’d like a user to click on without first going through the site, add them to the robots.txt file.

Obviously there are additional instances where you’ll have something else wrong, SEO-wise or user-wise, with your site, causing issues with rankings and conversions, but this is a good start to help you figure out what to look for, as these are definitely the most common problems that I’m seeing with the sites that I analyze.

Just remember this: Any link building campaign that doesn’t take SEO and usability into account is not a link building campaign that will withstand the test of time. You may still rank, but you won’t close the deal.

It’s no wonder that question and answer sites continue to gain in popularity, and while I’ve viewed them as a great free or inexpensive marketing and personal branding tool for awhile now, it’s only recently that I’ve come to see how useful they can be at helping everyone build links and do better SEO.

Think about how you’d search online if you weren’t ultra-familiar with search engines and data. You’d use longer-tailed queries probably, for one thing, and you’d hopefully be better able to hone in on more relevant results in the SERPs. Now think about all the ways questions can help you when you’re marketing online.

Now, there are some amazing tools out there for keyword discovery of course, but look at how different our keywords would be if we used a traditional keyword tool (in this case it’s Google Adwords’ tool) vs. a Q&A site (Quora, in this example):

Google Adwords Tool

Google Adwords data for NYC Restaurants

Quora

Quora questions

As you’ll see, both searches give you some results that aren’t exactly what you’re looking for but are indeed related. (Obviously, if you’re going to be eating cupcakes, you’ll need a nice place to run right?) Using the above example, think about using Q&A sites for the following tasks.

Keyword Research For Content

Let’s say you’re writing new content for your New York restaurants site. Using the above data, you can see both popular phrases used when searching for what you have to offer and you can see other related bits to add in.

Maybe you’d not yet thought about desserts (pie and cupcakes in this case) as being something to work in, yet the Quora data triggers an idea for a separate piece of content about all the great places to buy those in Manhattan.

Key Terms For Use With Social Media

New ideas are always helpful when using social media, as you can better see which phrases to use to attract your targets and interact with them.

I have mentioned Followerwonk before as it’s a fantastic tool to use to see how Twitter users describe themselves in their bios, and having new phrases gleaned from Q&A data means you can expand your search here as well.

Others use Followerwonk in hopes of finding you, too, remember, so if they’re relevant, these new phrases can be added to your bio.

Followerwonk

New Ways Of Discovering Potential Link Targets

If you use manual searches in order to discover link targets, Q&A sites can give you tons of new ways to phrase your queries. I absolutely cannot live without the Solo SEO link search tool for generating queries as it alleviates all that pesky typing and leads you straight to query results.

Instead of just using your typical “New York city restaurants” phrase here, use a few other ones gleaned from what Q&A sites say that people are talking about.

These same new topic ideas will work with advanced search queries, straight up manual discovery in any search engine, and directory searches.

New Ways Of Discovering Potential Sources & Topics For Guest Posts

Similar to what I said regarding keyword research for your own copy, this information can easily help you narrow down your guest post searches (maybe instead of just looking for sites wanting posts about NYC restaurants you’ll now look for sites seeking posts about desserts in the Northeast) and give you ideas on new content.

Quora is my favorite for keeping updated on related questions and can be great for triggering ideas for new posts, with their “Someone adds a related question to a question I’m following” email option. Sometimes creativity strikes when you least expect it in your inbox, so I’m really loving this functionality.

A Few Popular Q&A Platforms

• Yahoo Answers
• Quora
• Answerbag
• Answers

Since there’s always something new popping up, just go and search for Q&A sites and I imagine you’ll find new ones. I’d suggest trying a few out in order to find which ones work best for you, too, as we all have our individual preferences and different marketplaces to work in.

Now to conclude, I’m not at all suggesting that we abandon traditional keyword tools or use Q&A in order to replace anything we use to do a better job with link building.

However, I am suggesting that diversifying your methods is a good idea, and using popular community sites to do that right now can only better your results.

As an SEO and a link builder, I’m tasked with making sure that search engines and users can find and interpret content, but as you can imagine, what works for one group doesn’t necessarily work for another.

With this in mind, I decided to take a couple of my link builders and go visit a few folks at our local Industries of the Blind (which I’ve toured before thanks to my friend and neighbor, Director of Operations Richard Oliver, featured on the homepage), in order to see how fully blind users navigate the Web using a screen reader program called JAWS. (JAWS stands for Jobs Access With Speech.)

As you might have guessed, I’m interested in how these users deal with on-page links and images, with anchors and ALT text. It didn’t hurt that the two men that we met with sounded exactly like Morgan Freeman, either.

“By Federal regulations if you are considered visually impaired, you are not blind. Visual impairment runs between 20/70 and 20/100. Legal blindess is 20/200 in best eye with corrective lens or less than 20% field of view. So if you are blind you are visually impaired, but if you are visually impaired you are not legally blind.” ~ Richard Oliver

(For an idea of how JAWS works on a web page, see this JAWS demo video)

Cliff and Chris Alexander are twins who work with my friend at Industries of the Blind. Both are totally blind and use the computer in their employment. Chris demonstrated the JAWS software for us  and nicely gave me a free little usability consultation when I asked him to see how my agency’s site worked with the system. (It’s good!)

Now, this isn’t a review of the software, but a quick bit of information about it will show you why I’m so interested in it. JAWS reads out content, lists links, and describes images.

While the amount of content the system read out seemed fairly overwhelming to me, Chris was able to process it very easily and figure out what he wanted in about 5 seconds. He’s obviously used to using the software, but it did make me think about cumbersome, irrelevant content.

It also made me realize how poor a practice it is to slap in overly-keywordized ALT tags on images just to improve rankings.

If that image really is a “tiny little orange widget” then by all means, let that be your ALT text, but if it’s a photo of a nice, friendly bumblebee and your ALT is “play poker online” then you’re not only a poor SEO, you’re a misleading one.

Cleaning Out The Clutter In Code & Copy

Content clutter is a nightmare in general, but think about the impact of this on users who use a screen reader.

If you’ve never witnessed a visually impaired user (whether it’s full blindness or partial) having to wade through the audio of a poorly formatted and cluttered page, waiting for relevant information, you may not understand the effect that all this extra junk has on a person.

While Chris truly blew my mind with how quickly he could figure out the information that he needed and act on it, it was still a mess at times.

What if he’d found your site and wanted your product or service, but finally left for your competitor after being subjected to a ton of audio nonsense?

I’m not suggesting that we all stop being wordy, but I am suggesting that when we write, we make sure that it sounds ok when read out loud.

While statistics on how many people use a screen reader aren’t that readily available, it was reported in 2008 that 25.2 million Americans were unable to see even with the aid of lenses of some sort. That’s a lot of potential lost conversions, and a lot of people unfairly forced to work harder to do something that many of us take for granted.

Obviously,there are users with visual impairments who do not need or use screen readers.

My friend Richard, for example, is legally blind and has zero vision in one eye, with limited vision in the other. He is able to use mobile devices and a computer without needing a screen reader, although he does use a really cool magnifier which makes him look a bit like a preppy spy.

His wife is also legally blind and just holds a screen up close and squints at it in order to read it.

If either of them are reading a webpage that has links on it that aren’t coded to look like links which are easily recognizable as gateways to another page or site, they obviously aren’t going to find them and click. Of course, neither am I — most likely, neither are you, even if your vision is 20/20.

That’s a bad practice no matter how good or bad your vision is. Still, I have run across text that I think must be a link even though it doesn’t appear to be, possibly because links are my life and I’m suspicious, but obviously a simple mouseover proves me right or wrong. Someone with a visual impairment probably isn’t going to do that.

More Tips To Make Your Internal Link Building Inclusive

What about colorblind users? We’ve been fortunate enough to see recent posts being written about this so I won’t go into it in detail here, although some of my recommendations for making links accessible to visually impaired users do deal with this. In case you’re interested, Jordan Kasteler wrote a really good post about accessible web design on the Blueglass blog.

Also consider problems with a recommendation that most of us link builders do constantly make to clients: noise anchors. “Click here” doesn’t exactly tell you what type of data you’ll encounter if you do indeed click. Noise anchors are good for fleshing out a link profile because they are a natural way that people have linked in the past, but they aren’t descriptive for a visually impaired user.

If a screen reader reads out “Click here”, will the user ignore the link? I most likely would, especially if I had to listen to a screen reader quickly running through a list of links. This is a good case for brand and URL links, though, providing your company isn’t boringly named something like A Great Company.

The Next Frontier For Web Accessibility

In recent news about assistive technology, the American Council of the Blind announced that they are partnering with Google in order to better assess how blind, visually impaired, and deaf-blind users make use of the Web and access information.

So to conclude, here are a few best practices for optimizing links for visually impaired users:

• Underline your links for users who aren’t using a screen reader but may have visual impairment and not be able to recognize a link otherwise.
• Make your links a different color than the surrounding text, and make that different color a shade that is very different from your regular text so that a colorblind user can determine that it’s a link.
• Make visited links a different color than nonvisited links.
• Use relevant title and ALT text in order to describe an image. Depending upon your browser, you may see one or the other when you mouseover an image. However,  ALT is the standard used in screen readers.
• Be careful when using noise anchors and ALT  text; if a screen reader is being used, something irrelevant or not very descriptive can easily cost you a click.
• Make sure your content (all of it, including your anchors, ALT texts, etc.) makes sense when read out loud.
• When using image links, name the images in a relevant manner. An image named something like “image51.jpg” isn’t likely to generate enough interest for a click. The ALT  text should be read out if a screen reader is being used, but to cover all your bases, consider relevant naming for the images themselves, as if no ALT text is found, some systems will indeed try to determine what the image is based on its file name.
• Be careful when sending links to subpages that aren’t relevant to the anchor or ALT text. This can cause annoyance and loss of time if a visually impaired user has to continue to back out and search for a new link to get to the desired content.

So let’s all try and be more inclusive when we build links. As you may have ascertained, the practices listed above are simply common sense for any user.

By making our content as clutter-free and navigable as possible and our links relevant and descriptive, we all stand the chance to do better business on the Web. If you have any other ideas for ways to help make links more usable for the visually impaired, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Image courtesy of http://www.standards-schmandards.com

Two years ago, we could make sites rank for just about anything by grabbing up links like crazy. Now, while that can still happen, the stickiness of those rankings just isn’t there. Link quality is more important.

If a site’s quality is determined to be low, a link from that site may not pass the desired link juice to your site for rankings improvements, and it may not rank well enough itself, causing you to lose out on potential traffic. If your own site is of low quality in Google’s eyes, you also won’t rank well, causing decreased visibility and less chances for natural links.

As higher quality sites move up in the rankings, users will become more adept at identifying what makes a quality site, and even if they do actually to happen to find yours on page 10, they still may not consider it an authority worthy of trust. More lost links.

Normally, to evaluate a site to see if it’s a good linking partner, my link builders look at things such as the following:

• Number of backlinks to home page
• Number of backlinks to other pages on the site
• Home page and subpage toolbar PR (yes, I know it’s not a great metric but clients do still love it)
• Quality of backlinks (are there .edus, are there mostly sitewides and footers, etc)
• Moz Rank

However, here are the five metrics that I feel are even more important in terms of quickly telling me if a link on a site will be good for traffic and not just a jump in rankings.

Metric #1: Crawl Frequency

Has the site been crawled in the past few days? While I don’t think that crawl frequency can stand alone as a quality indicator, I do think that a higher quality site is crawled more often than once a month. While I am also interested in site update frequency if it’s a blog we’re talking about, I still value crawl date more because as any of us who write know, it’s not always easy to find the time to write.

I wouldn’t want a link from a blog that hadn’t been updated in 2 years, of course, but that’s because I’d not consider it a great source of traffic. Comments on blog posts are something to look at though, as if you’re getting relevant and non-spammy/linkdrop comments on old blog posts, that’s a good sign. It means that there is actual interest.

Where to find it: The cache: command can tell you when Google last crawled the site. If it’s older than 2 weeks, I see that as much less positive than if the last crawl was yesterday.

Metric #2: Origin Of The Domain

Is the site a dropped domain? Is it a porn site that has become a blog about woodworking? If so, I don’t want it. Not all dropped domains are bad of course but some could be penalized.

If you come across a site that was a dropped domain but is still carrying on in a relevant manner (like if it was previously a finance site, changed hands, has good backlinks, and is still a finance site, albeit under new ownership) then I’d take a link, definitely.

Where to find it: The Wayback Machine (when it works)

Metric #3: Quality Content

While I don’t want to sound like Justice Potter Stewart here, I can’t necessarily define quality but I know it when I see it. A quality site has quality content. It doesn’t have to have a high end digital design, or be running on the latest trendy blogging platform. It doesn’t have to use CSS instead of tables.

It just has to make me trust it. If it’s an e-commerce site, I should feel ok ordering from it. If it’s a blog, I should feel comfortable trusting the information. I don’t want the site to exist just for the purpose of hosting a link, nor do I want to only see scraped content.

Where to find it: Obviously, on the site itself…but most importantly, look around at a couple of subpages and ensure that it’s not just the home page that has quality content.

Is there legitimate contact information on the site somewhere? Does the content provided seem to be accurate? Also, familiarize yourself with how Google defines quality.

Metric #4: Online Sentiment

If you search for the site/brand name, is the first result a negative review? Are there more than 5 negative SERPs on the first page? If it’s a blog, are most of the comments from people who totally disagree with the authors?

Where to find it: do a quick search for the site/brand and just check the first 10 results. Check a blog post’s comments to get a general idea of how well received the content is.

Metric #5: Social Media Presence

Does the site have share buttons on it? Do they have a Twitter and/or Facebook account that’s well utilized to do more than just push links? If so, this makes me think the potential for traffic from my link will be even greater.

Where to find it: Social media share buttons can be found almost anywhere on a site. If it’s a blog, they should be present on each post. If it’s a company site, I wouldn’t expect to find social share buttons necessarily but I would expect to find links over to the site’s social media accounts.

Finally, it’s obviously worth considering how your own site fares with these quick metrics, as you want your site to be linkable for those times when you don’t feel like asking/begging/ for links. If you’re hoping to gain links, you need to make sure that your site is actually linkworthy.

I love the idea of only having $100 to get started because many times, having less money means you have to get more creative. So, since I’ve spent my theoretical $100 already (in the post above), everything else I’d advise is free.

So far we’ve set up social media accounts, used a few free tools in order to find more Twitter followers, analyze our Twitter work, and keep abreast of all of our online mentions.

Advertise Your Business The Old-School Way

If you don’t already have business cards, use some software to print some out or call in a favor to your friend down the block who works in a printing shop. You don’t have to get fancy here, as my goal is simple: I want you to be able to show someone your URL.

Put these cards up on bulletin boards at the community center, drop them in fishbowls to win free meals at restaurants, and give them out to anyone who asks what you do for a living. The takeaway here? You’re getting free visibility.

General Online Branding

Add your URL to your email signature. Set up a Google profile page that lists your URL. Check Knowem to see if your blog/brand is available on a ton of social media sites. While they have a great package that secures these for you, since we’re going for free here, I would advise making use of the service in order to quickly see which ones you should grab. You’ll see what is available along with links to go sign up yourself. It’s time-consuming but, again, free.

Guest Post On Other Sites

Find other bloggers in your industry and ask them if you can write a guest post for their site. This is a great way to get a link back to your own site, build personal brand visibility, and start to become a part of the community.

Find 10 sites that have posts on them with which you don’t fully agree. Ask to have your on take on the subject posted. Find 10 sites that have posts that give you ideas to flesh out further, and do the same.

Find 10 sites that deal with your subject but aren’t regularly updated, and ask if you can become a regular contributor. You’d be surprised at the number of webmasters who will ask you to send them more content once they’ve seen your (quality) content.

For straight up guest post/article searches: (and thanks to Solo SEO’s Link Search Tool for the list. Why reinvent the wheel?)

• pet insurance guest writer
• pet insurance guest blog post writer
• pet insurance submit content
• pet insurance submit article
• pet insurance submit post
• pet insurance submit blog post
• pet insurance add article
• pet insurance add blog post
• pet insurance add content
• pet insurance guest blogger wanted

However, not everyone advertises that they accept guest posts, so make sure to contact bloggers in your area even if they don’t say they’re asking for guest posts. In addition, there are services such as My Blog Guest that can help put you in contact with sites that accept guest posts.

Conduct Interviews

Interview someone in your industry. People love talking about themselves. You’ll raise exposure for your site through the interview and hopefully generate some favorable mentions/links from the person whom you interview.

Answer Questions

Give out free advice. This helps build your personal brand, causing people to seek you out. Go to Yahoo Answers and search for questions in your area of expertise, and answer them. Do the same with Quora. Both of these services also tweet certain questions and answers, further raising visibility.

However, don’t stop there! There are indeed others that may suit you. Here are two more that I think have good visibility potential. (Please note that just like with almost anything, you’ll occasionally see spammy stuff and possibly offensive material on these sites.)

Sites like Answerbag lets you create a question in poll-format, should you choose to participate by asking and not just answering.

Answerly is a helpful site because it provides you with results from multiple FAQ platforms.

Find Your Audience

Use Icerocket in the same way that I previously advised you to use Followerwonk…to help find potential followers/fans. This service lets you search blogs, the web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images. It also has a feature called Big Buzz which shows nicely grouped results from all of those areas.

Since I can’t find a Facebook-specific tool for this, I use this one. (Please let me know if you know of something though!) Another cool thing about using Icerocket to help you connect with people on Facebook is that you can both go to the person’s Facebook page and you can directly visit the links people post, which in my example are mainly YouTube videos of Bryan Ferry.

If I had a blog about Bryan Ferry (and I should) then I’d be able to use this to connect with other fans on YouTube, possibly subscribing to their channels and letting them know about my own channel (which of course I would have being a Bryan Ferry blogger.)

*Depending upon your niche, sites like Flickr and YouTube might be the right fit for you. Both these sites can help you draw people in with visuals, but skip both if your area of expertise isn’t something that lends itself to photography and video.

Use Evernote

This application is definitely the one I’d choose if I could only pick one. I write blog posts in it, use it for travel, clip screenshots, recipes, etc. It’s invaluable to me and it’s available as a standalone app on your computer, on the web, and as a mobile app.

If you’re a blogger, I imagine you’re constantly having new ideas for posts and looking for cool things to write about. This app makes that so easy. It’s free but you can do a premium subscription. However since I’m in the free section here, let’s go with that for now. Free.

Be Real, Be Nice

Be nice. I cannot overstate the importance here. I know that it can be trendy to be snarky and argumentative, and that can certainly help you build links, but most of the time, if you’re a jerk to someone, that person isn’t going to ask to interview you on his or her site. People don’t tend to reach out to someone when they’re afraid of being a target or being ridiculed.

So what if we had $500 to spend? Still inexpensive, as far as marketing budgets go, but it’s not outrageous. Here’s how I’d spend my extra $400.

Research Potential Link Sources

Grab a $29 daypass for Link Research Tools and research the heck out of your competition. This gives you 3 link prospecting reports and 3 backlink reports (which you can use to see who links to other blogs in your niche.) Use this information to find webmasters who might be willing to link to you, and reach out to them.

Dress People

Have 10 t-shirts printed from Cafe Press at a cost of around $140. You can create whatever design you like (I vote for squirrels.) Yes, do another contest…everyone who mentions your blog on Twitter/Facebook gets entered into a drawing to win a shirt.

Anyone who’s willing to add you to their blogroll gets entered twice. Also, offer a contest for the best blog post written about why said blogger should win your shirt. Winner gets a free shirt and one for a friend. $140

Sponsor A Local Event/Meetup

If you’re lucky enough to have a local community that shares your interest, this is a great way to get your name out there. Simply laying down a $100 bar tab will make at least 10 people very happy. If there’s an existing event that is in your niche, offer to sponsor it, at least partially. Since we’re dealing with a smaller budget here I’d say not to go above $100.

Meetup is a service that lets you enter your area of interest and a location so you can easily find something near you. If nothing is out there, you can start something here. You can also just look for meetups in your local area, as you don’t have to be tied to your exact niche. $100.

Do What Makes Sense For Your Niche

With the remainder of the budget ($131) I’d pick and choose from the following, depending upon my niche:

• Get nicer business cards. $100
• Sponsor one more $100 meetup. $100
• Wait a month or two, then repeat one of the $50 contests listed above. This gets fresh eyes on your site. $50 (or $100 if you repeat them both)
• Do the same thing with the t-shirts, with a new design, in a month or so. $140
• Be a community giver in your area. If a local fundraiser is happening and a group is requesting sponsors, spend what you can. You’ll get a mention and possibly a link. $10 and up
• Buy some Google Adwords ads for a month. A small budget can still bring you good visiblity. $50 and up

As you can see, there really is a lot that you can do for free or very little. Time is usually a major factor in the success of any marketing effort, and just because you have loads of cash to throw around does not at all mean that you’ll be successful.

Even if you do have a large budget, pretend you don’t, even if just for an hour, and think about what you would do if you didn’t. You’d be surprised at all the creative ideas that will fill your mind.

If webmasters didn’t ask for money, we wouldn’t buy links. If no one offered money though, webmasters wouldn’t ask for it. It’s the chicken or the egg, all over again.

The recent Harvard porn links outing is just one of many high-profile outing stories but it’s one that really hits home because hey, it’s Harvard!

It’s Harvard hosting links to pornographic sites on what is supposed to be a pristine .edu domain, the gold standard of great links. It’s Harvard having redirects that take you to a porn site when you click on a seemingly harmless URL in their search results.

I know how this happens because, like you, I suspect that someone is using less-than-stellar link building practices. Also, I’ve seen tons of examples that show how amazingly simple it is to place links on .edu sites, whether through buying them or taking advantage of open-source platforms like Joomla and WordPress in order to inject spammy links.

Just for fun, I looked at a few other .edu sites, and on every one, I found what I’d consider to be paid or spammy links. Now, many people would argue that any paid link is spammy, but I don’t always agree with that. Some paid links are nicely done and relevant, but a spammy link is one that obviously is completely irrelevant to the page and only there in order to make you click and go to the desired target.

Students are oftentimes desperate for money, and they’re enjoying the first taste of freedom by raging against the machine. Selling space on a student page at their university seems like a fairly harmless way to stick it to the man and get more money for beer or textbooks or rent.

Then again you have the injected spammy links, which are most likely just the results of link spammers who simply know how to do it. They do this on all types of sites, not just .edu domains, but I do have to think that most people doing any sort of link building know just how good the .edu link juice tastes.

It’s also a common practice to build links by offering “sponsorships” for university clubs, especially the really boring ones that have 3 members. The reality is, it’s frighteningly easy to buy links from students who have access to space on a .edu. What’s shocking to me is that this is only coming to the general public’s attention now, after years of abuse.

Here are just three of the types of paid/spammy links that I found:

1. The “Research Page” link. This link is on an Ivy League school’s domain, courtesy of a money-hungry student who wanted some help funding one of his research projects. The only clever part of his paragraph of links is that the 4 sites he links to have 4 unique ip addresses.

2. The “obviously a presell page” link. Also on the domain of an even more prestigious Ivy League school, this page only exists in order to link to a gambling site.

3. The “this is just the kind of thing I like linking to!” link. Ah, the student homepage…full of links, all apparently just things the student webmasters enjoys! He enjoys everything from designer paper supplies to organic dog treats.

Yes, this is what the link economy has given us. Anything can be gamed in some way. It’s not just the industries which have the potential to offend that are doing it, either. It’s anyone who realizes that students will sell link space.

Who Is To Blame For The Link Economy?

Some say that Google has created this nightmare themselves. Some blame agencies and link builders who are willing to buy links. Some blame clients who want to take what they consider to be the easy way out, unfairly competing with others who play by the rules. I think it’s all of those.

Google’s attempts to curb the practice of buying links aren’t working, which is why we’re seeing so many high-profile outings. People are disgusted with Google not taking care of the unfair advantage a site owner with loads of cash has over his competitors.

Plus, and this is always important, people like to think they’ve found something that hasn’t yet been found. It wasn’t news to any link builder that I know that JCPenney was buying links. Harvard’s website hosting these questionable links is no different. It’s the general public who is shocked by something that we consider to be just the way it is.

Now since Harvard has been publicly outed and discussed, I decided that it wouldn’t violate my principles to dig into their outgoing links even further in order to check on another industry frequently accused of pushing spam…yes, pharmacy. (Thanks to Michelle Robbins for the idea, by the way.)

Since Stephen Chapman, the SEO Whistleblower at ZDNet, has already opened up this can of worms and showed you exactly how he found this stuff, I have no problems just furthering it. I’m just applying his same search methods to show you that this problem is not strictly related to porn, so you can go do your own research and type in viagra, cialis, cash advance, payday loans, etc.

You’ll find results, unless they fix all of this before you have the chance. Just in case, check out this nice Viagra page on the Harvard domain…

Here’s the really spammy bit of this though. If you click on the result you go to the target page (for a second or two) then get redirected to a site selling, yes, Viagra. Yikes. I mean yes, it’s obvious that if you click on that result, you’re going to a Viagra-related bit of content, but you do expect to stay on the Harvard site, do you not?

And horribly enough, this Viagra link was (and I say was because after I screenshotted it and went back to it, it had been removed) listed in the right nav with other links for this doctor such as Curriculum Vitae. Quality stuff.

However, when I discussed this example with Debra Mastaler she pointed out that the person whose page these links are on may not control the page and may have no clue. That honestly would not surprise me. However, it did look like this:

As you can see, this has serious potential for messing with someone’s credibility. Is this really how we want to build links, even in ultra-competitive industries?

What about payday loans? Yep, they’re there too.

The bottom line here is that it’s incredibly easy to obtain links from the more noble sites. So far, we’ve also seen a giant retailer outed and seen the same thing happen to a florist. This stuff is everywhere — so what do you do? Report it to the webmaster, especially if you think it’s an injected link? Report it to Google? Contact the media? Out them on your website? Grin and bear it?

As Adam Audette pointed out, tattling seems to be the new way to compete. As you know, once a high-profile outing occurs, it makes Google look like their algorithm isn’t working properly in order to weed out the crap, so they are forced to do something about it. A manual review/slap seems to be what it takes to clean up the results.

What Is The Solution To This Problem?

People won’t stop offering money for links any more than webmasters will stop taking payments. People won’t stop injecting links when these free blogging platforms are hackable, either.

If you’ve ever done anything less than white hat, you’ll know that there’s a way to game just about anything. Should SEOs stop approaching .edu sites with cash offers for links? What about the non-paid links that appear? What if a student does truly like a certain brand and links to it? That’s completely feasible, but the witchhunt isn’t yet interested in those kinds of links, as they are not juicy enough to write about.

Maybe certain industries aren’t yet buying or injecting links on student pages, of course. Maybe big brands are doing it but have the wherewithal to make those links look perfectly natural. I also know for a fact that you can indeed hide the fact that a link has been bought, so I imagine that it’s easy to do some much better link injections than the ones that I’ve seen thus far. Porn, pharmacy, and payday loans catch our eye immediately though.