Every day it seems that there's a new tool out there to monitor, measure, track, and suggest what we should be doing. Many of these are free or offer free trials, which I love, but finding the time to test out a new tool in order to see if it suits you isn't always easy. 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 becaus [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | How To | How To: Links | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

Much has been written about the poor in-house SEO, fighting the good fight to inculcate SEO awareness and best practices throughout the organization. This is an unenviable task and more than one in-house has shared a narrative with me that sounds something like this:  SEO:  “So, I’m concerned that we’re not proactively link-building and that may have a negative impact on our high quality in bound traffic.” Executive:  “But when I type-in the company’s name, we are number one in Google.” SEO:  “Yes, well you are getting personalized results AND there’s a lot more to [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | How To | How To: Links | In House Search Marketing | Link Building | Link Building: General

If you read my previous Link Week entry, Why Canonicalization Matters From A Linking Perspective, you know that canonicalization - the process of selecting and using one specific URL for each page on your website for indexing in search - is vitally important for consolidating potential link juice. This is because search engines index URLs to get content, so when multiple versions of URLs point to the same content, that content’s Page Rank is diluted across those URLs. Today, I want to advance that concept a bit more. Let’s look at how the external world of the Web views your business. I [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | How To | How To: Links | Link Week | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing

Everyone in our field knows that inbound links are an important facet of search engine optimization (SEO) – search engines regard them as votes of approval from the linking sites. That’s why webmasters and optimizers invest so much work on link building. Unfortunately, with link building, you are usually left counting on someone else to do the job that’s so important to you. You actively ask another webmaster (or blogger, online author, or worse yet, a casual, social media user) to link to a page on your website. You depend on them to do the job right. You can even give them explicit [...]

Related Topics: Google: Webmaster Central | How To | How To: Links | Intermediate | Link Week

Asking questions is considered to be one of the most basic yet the most effective ways of learning. Whether you ask questions to better understand a technique, an event, or a motive, you're gaining insight that should help you in the present and the future. 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 onl [...]

Related Topics: How To | How To: Links | Intermediate | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week