Feb 29, 2012 at 2:41pm ET by David de Souza

Governments, non-profit and other organisations are under constant pressure to improve transparency and, as a result, are making vast amounts of data available to the public. The range of data sets available is enormous, with 16 nations currently spear heading open data initiatives, and countless private organisations publishing data online - the US alone has published more than 400,000 data sets. This free data presents an opportunity for anyone with a creative mind to produce something of real interest and, in return, acquire quality inbound links to their website. Furthermore, both th [...]

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

How To Find Link Prospects Without Using Google

Feb 21, 2012 at 3:29pm ET by Erin Everhart

I'm obsessed with Google. (I mean, you kind of have to be if you're in this industry.) But sometimes, you need a break from the hand that feeds. There's no denying the power of advanced search queries, but you'd be surprised how many other and different prospects you can find without using the search engine at all. Curated Lists OK, I lied. You do have to use Google for this, but not nearly in the capacity you would with normal searches. With lists, you have less sources to sift through but the value of the sites far outweigh normal SERPs. My favorite searches — thanks to SEOmoz — [...]

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

9 Free Tools For Link Discovery & Content Creation

Feb 7, 2012 at 10:18am ET by Julie Joyce

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 [...]

How To Terrify Executives Into Linkbuilding

Nov 16, 2011 at 9:01am ET by Conrad Saam

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 [...]

How To Canonicalize URLs As Backlinks In Local Search & Online Business Directories

Nov 1, 2011 at 9:24am ET by Rick DeJarnette

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 [...]

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