Link Week looks at one of the most fundamental and yet challenging aspects of search marketing: Building and nurturing those all-important inbound links to your website. Columnists offer insights and tips for effective link building and discuss controversial techniques like linkbaiting and buying links.

Link Building Tool Review: WordTracker Link Builder

Jan 31, 2012 at 10:58am ET by Debra Mastaler

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: Channel: SEO | Link Building: General | Link Week

Infographics: Why They Fail For Link Building

Jan 24, 2012 at 9:18am ET by Erin Everhart

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: Channel: SEO | Link Week

Linking Strategies For Google Plus Your World

Jan 17, 2012 at 9:28am ET by Eric Ward

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 just [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

Link For The Real World, Not Just Your Site

Jan 10, 2012 at 9:17am ET by Julie Joyce

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: Channel: SEO | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

Link Building Tool Review: Ontolo

Jan 3, 2012 at 10:01am ET by Debra Mastaler

Welcome back to the first Link Week of 2012, I hope you enjoyed the holidays and had a great New Year celebration! Next up in our tool review series: Ontolo Internet Marketing Tools The current Ontolo toolset is owned by partners Ben Wills and Andy Davidoff and has been a work in progress since 2008. The tool is designed to find link prospects based on topic, link types and phrases you provide. It pulls prospects from the search results, analyzes, filters and then places what it finds in a customized database. Ben Wills explains the process like this: Here's an example of how On [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

9 New Year’s Resolutions For Link Building In 2012

Dec 27, 2011 at 11:21am ET by Rick DeJarnette

Wow, it seems like only yesterday we were all obsessed with the first (of what became many) Panda updates (which was initially called the Farmer Update) from Google and the New York Times story on JC Penney’s Holiday 2010 foray into buying paid links. Oh, yeah, good times. But 2012 is now staring us in the face, and as long as the ancient Mayan calendar merely resets back to the beginning of another cycle in December 2012, we have a lot to look forward to. To help all of us in the SEO/link building community keep productive in the next year, I’ve come up with a set of New Year’s re [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

A Few Link Building Predictions For 2012

Dec 20, 2011 at 11:51am ET by Eric Ward

It's prediction time again. Before I dive into predictions for 2012, let's take a look back at where I've been wrong and right over the years. I have a fairly good track record, and I like to take a few chances with these, rather than taking the easy way out with predictions like "links will still matter". Footer Links Get The Boot? I was quite wrong about search engines devaluing all footer link networks. As easy as these are to spot, it baffles me that some sites can achieve high rankings via this spammy tactic. Check out this amazing expose blog post from Joost de Valk. Prediction [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

Link Building Tool Review: Majestic SEO

Dec 13, 2011 at 9:25am ET by Julie Joyce

Next up in our tool review series is Majestic SEO's suite. There are 4 levels of access with one being free (and limited) and the others being grouped by the amount of reports/access to their API needed. (Note: the free package may still require you to register in order to see a fuller dataset.) Paid plans range from £29.99 to £250.00 per month, excluding VAT (and for those of you not familiar with VAT, it's a value-added tax on the purchase price.) For our purposes here in Link Week, I'll be reviewing the Site Explorer, Backlink History, Neighbourhood Checker, and Clique Hunter. Basic [...]

‘Tis The Season For Link Baiting

Dec 6, 2011 at 4:19pm ET by Stephan Spencer

Ah, the holidays! It's that time of year -- for egg nog, carolers, sleigh rides, Yuletide cheer, roasting chestnuts, and... link bait! Yes, you heard right. The holidays are a great time to launch link bait campaigns, because you can piggy-back on the popularity of the holiday and of peoples' enthusiasm for it. That doesn't just apply to Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/etc. but also key holidays throughout the year, such as Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Independence Day, and Halloween. In general, seasonal link baiting makes a lot of sense. Now let me chronicle for you one of my absolute favo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

Manual Link Building Is Hard, But There Are No Shortcuts To Value

Nov 29, 2011 at 12:05pm ET by Rick DeJarnette

Link building is hard work. Allow me to clarify that: Building legitimate links that have genuine value in search is hard work. Some folks don’t have patience for that hard work, so they turn to alternative means to acquire links. Sometimes they simply do ineffective work. Sometimes they seek links from junk sites that accept any link request they receive. And sometimes they cheat. They might pay a fee to have link farms link back to them en masse or they might create their own network of low-to-no value sites for the sole purpose of having them all link back to the primary site. The p [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

Thoughts On Random Link Spikes & The Events That Create Them

Nov 22, 2011 at 12:33pm ET by Eric Ward

If you need some interesting reading material this Holiday season, try Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life. There are some interesting lessons in it that can be applied to link building, especially related to unexpected and random events that not only affect people, the economy, news, and markets, but if you think it through, weblinks. It's rarely discussed for its organic ranking effect, but there can be no doubt random and unexpected events have a dramatic effect on the web's link graph. Some link spikes occur as a re [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

Link Building Tool Review: SEO Book

Nov 15, 2011 at 12:53pm ET by Julie Joyce

For many search marketers, SEO Book is a legend. Founded by (another legend) Aaron Wall in 2003, SEO Book now includes Aaron's wife Giovanna Villanueva, Peter Da Vanzo, and Eric Covino. Membership works out to around $10 a day ($300 a month) and includes over 100 custom training modules, a private forum, exclusive members-only tools, and much more. There are also free tools available including the ubiquitous SEO for Firefox. 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 [...]

Is Pinterest The Next Great Place To Get Links & Social Mentions?

Nov 8, 2011 at 9:29am ET by Erin Everhart

Even if you’re one of the few people who say they love link building, it’s still the most tedious aspect to being an SEO. It seems like new sites pop up weekly, if not daily, as "yet another great way to get links." While the creative part of you may be motivated from a new, untapped resource, the overworked part of you is likely deflated. Consider Pinterest just one of those latest resources. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard where you can tag and organize images from across the Internet into category-specific groups. You can pin things yourself by adding the URL or you can repin som [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

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 [...]

How Not To Link To Us

Oct 25, 2011 at 1:12pm ET by Eric Ward

Creating a linking instructions page is a fairly common technique for encouraging organic links. It's also somewhat puzzling. Do we need instructions for this most basic Web action? Apparently, at least 2.4 billion of us do. A webpage can link to another webpage in several ways, from the basic text link like this, http://searchengineland.com, to a graphical link via an image or logo. Widgets are often embedded with links, and the old free-webpage-counter-with-a-sneaky-hidden-link trick is alive and well, if on life support. Why Have One? A linking instructions page is usually designed to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

5 SEO Issues That Can Affect A Link Campaign

Oct 18, 2011 at 12:23pm ET by Julie Joyce

I recently did the SMX East 2011 Link Clinic with Rae Hoffman-Dolan and beforehand, this being my first time speaking at an event, I wanted some advice. One thing she said really hit home, and that was not to turn the session into an SEO clinic. I would have done just that actually. 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 [...]

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

Link Building Tool Review: Raven Tools

Oct 11, 2011 at 9:27am ET by Debra Mastaler

Third in our series are the link building tools from Raven Internet Marketing Tools. Raven Tools, founded in 2007, has a 20-person staff based in the country music capital of the world, Nashville, Tenn. Raven's development team of eight is hard at work finalizing three new features set to launch between now and mid-November; vice president of marketing Taylor Pratt hinted one of them will be a major change to the social media monitoring tool. There are three types of tools in the Raven tool set: SEO tools, social media tools and advertising tools. With the exception of the 30-day tri [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

How To Capture Broken Inbound Links

Oct 4, 2011 at 1:05pm ET by Rick DeJarnette

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 [...]

A Holiday & Seasonal Event-Driven Link Building Primer

Sep 28, 2011 at 11:37am ET by Eric Ward

With the holiday season fast approaching, let's run through a quick event-driven link marketing strategy primer, with a few examples. [caption id="attachment_94480" align="alignright" width="234" caption="Woody costume courtesy of http://www.justkidcostumes.com"][/caption] For this column, I'll focus on the most basic of event-driven link marketing techniques. With this technique, you get out your calendar, look a few months ahead to see what's coming, then look for ways to tweak your content in order to capitalize on the natural spike in interest, searches, and editorial coverage the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Week

How To Use Q&A Sites To Help Build Better Links

Sep 20, 2011 at 11:47am ET by Julie Joyce

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 [...]

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