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

This week's tool review focuses on the Link Builder toolset from Wordtracker. Wordtracker has been around since 1998 and is most widely known as a keyword research tool. In 2010, they added Link Builder in response to consumer demand and to help their keyword customers with their link building efforts. Based in London, the Wordtracker staff is an international bunch, hailing from England, France, Italy, India, Australia and Ireland. To prove this,  CMO Ken McGaffin jokingly pointed out: I'm an Irishman, living in Scotland, working in London for an English company that does most of its [...]

Related Topics: Link Building: General | Link Week

We’ve all seen them: too much of them. They filter through our Twitter stream, pop up in our News Feed, and infiltrate our search results. My dear friends, we are in infographic overload, and if we don’t do something now, it may be too late for us all. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against infographics completely. I’d be hypocrite if I were because at 352 Media Group, we use them for our clients and ourselves. They do work — well. But more often than not, they fail— terribly. I’m not saying we’ve done all of ours 100 percent perfectly, but that’s a key part of link buil [...]

Related Topics: Link Week

With all the hoopla and hundreds of columns and posts about the launch of Google's “Search Plus Your World”, you are likely already quite aware of what has taken place over the past week. If not, Danny Sullivan eloquently covers it in detail in his post Google’s Results Get More Personal With "Search Plus Your World".  If you only read one post on the topic, that's the one to read. But this column is called Link Week, and, since as most of you know by now I have been helping content and content seekers find each other since way before Google existed, I could not be happier. I had [...]

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The goal of most link building campaigns is to drive traffic to your site and get amazing rankings. However, consider this: with all the available social media channels where people will be engaging with your brand, why not view them with the same importance as your main site? 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 [...]

Related Topics: Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week