This week we’re joined in Whiteboard Studios by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric knows a thing or two about link building campaigns, so he and Rand discuss the many tactics one can employ when building bulk links, everything from shiny white hat to shady black hat, and everything in between.
Link Building
White To Black Hat Link Building Techniques
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November 18 | Link Building Videos | Ryan Clark
Tagged Black Hat, Link Building, seomoz, white hat
Using Trust Rank to Guide Your Link Building
November 18 | Link Building Videos | Ryan Clark
This week Rand discusses Trust as a ranking factor: how it originated, what it may look like, and how you can use it when planning your link building campaigns. The closer you can get to major authority sites, the more trust your links are likely to have, and as we all know, trusted links are the most powerful links.
6 Untapped CMS Resources For Theme Link Building
I’ve been keeping a close eye on the different open source CMS’s that are coming out these days, mainly for link building opportunities. If you’re a WordPress or Joomla theme designer you most likely have distributed free themes in order to build links and get exposure for your work. I’m aware that Google has been watching this practice closely because a lot of folks were selling the link spots(Sponsored Themes Discussed @ Webmaster World). Now if you’re a web design company or freelancer, there is no problem using this as a form of marketing. Unfortunately the theme market for the likes of phpBB, vBulletin, WordPress, Joomla, yaddy yadda, is way over saturated these days.
There are all sorts of new open source CMS’s coming on the market, and a handful of them are starting to get a large use rbase. There are CMS’s for DIGG clones, forums, social networking sites, social bookmarking, web 2.0 and new blogging platforms. These are perfect times to grab some new business and get a chance to work with a different platform. Because there are so many the possibilities are endless, and would be a great way to expand your design firm to the next level. Lets take a look at 6 CMS’s that are growing rapidly and are desperately in the need of both free and premium themes.
Pligg is almost perhaps too popular to be called an “untapped resource”, but since it makes for a perfect first example I’ll go with it. I’m not sure on the exact number of downloads, but looking at a few factors indicates that there have been a few hundred thousand downloads of Pligg in the past few years. You can search for “powered by pligg” which is nowhere near acurate at 1.5 million results. That and the fact the forum has 35 thousand members is how I can up with that number. The search phrase “Pligg Temaplates” is searched for on average 40xday. The competition in the search listings ins’t too scary and there are already a bunch of places you can promote your theme like in the Pligg forum.
Elgg is quite possibly the most popular open source social networking platform at the moment. The software its self is brilliant and there is no secret as to why it’s so popular. There are plenty of opportunities for theme design with Elgg both on the forums, gaining top rankings and freelance sites. The one thing I did notice about Elgg, which is also what made me write this post, is that there is a serious lacking in the theme department. You can advertise your free themes within the community, on various Elgg theme sites and try and rank for some quality keywords.
ModX has been gaining a lot of ground for its triumphant web 2.0 properties featuring clean SEO friendly code, and sexy Ajax to make it all spiffy. Their forum is very active in not only English, but many other languages which also shows a strong sign that ModX will be here for a long time to come. There is a strong need for paid and free themes and the link building opportunities are definitely there.
Social Web Content Management System(bloody mouthful) is a fork off from the first mentioned Pligg software and in my opinion looks and works like it will be the true champion of Digg clones soon enough. Now is a great time to build some links and buzz by creating great templates for this rapidly evolving CMS. Right now there are a few sites where you can submit your template as well hit up the template section on the user forum.
Concrete5 is one of my favorite up and coming CMS’s and I’d like you guys to take a minute to check out the demo, features and scalability of the framework. You PHP and Ajax programmers are going to have a fun time with this CMS. I trulely believe that Concrete5 will be making big waves in the near future and they’re going to need theme designers! Why not use the opportunity to build some quality links on this web 2.0 platform.
Plone is most likely a new word to your vocabulary, and it was fairly new to me up until the other day. Plone is a well supported and heavily used CMS that boats a long list of big sites running the platform. This CMS is great for community based websites as well sites that have a magazine/minimal feeling to them, so you’ll be able to get creative with your design. This is another example of a great CMS needing more designers and present more opportunities to build more links.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of possibilities for design teams to generate more business and build links from theme resources that are not over saturated. I hope you designers out there found this useful and that it gives you a ton of new ideas on how to drum up more business.
Google’s Note This Feature And Its Future In The Algorithm
November 15 | Link Building | Ryan Clark
I haven’t seen too much banter lately on the Google “Note This” feature within the search listings so I thought I’d see what you guys had to say. I’ve been noting my stuff and other sites for the past 6 months, unfortunately there really isn’t a way to tell if it has had any effect. I have no doubt in my mind this data will be used within Google’s ranking algorithm, just when is the question. How many of you have been using the Note This feature?
Tagged google, google algorithm, google note this, Link Building, seo
Link Building With Micro-Blogging Platform Kwippy
I’ve been searching around looking for do follow micro-blogging platforms because I’ve seen a huge increase of Twitter clones. A lot of these services don’t allow anchor text, but with a proper friends list and do follow links going out you can still help increase the link juice flow from utilizing a service like Kwippy. Kwippy is very much the same as Twitter except for the do follow link features in your updates, aswell there is a section to store public bookmarks socially and get some more link love from that. The platform is well put together and is very easy to read so it might make a good place to get some marketing done.
Raven SEO Tools
November 14 | Link Building Tools | Ryan Clark
I want to introduce the few of you who haven’t heard of these most amazing set of SEO tools I’ve ever got my hands on to this date. I’m going to be playing around with Raven SEO Tools this weekend and report back next monday, hopefully with the first episode of the Link Building Podcast. I’m going to be working on a new project of mine and using it as the demo website for my initial tests. I’d like to thank Matt and Jon from Sitening for getting in touch and giving me the opportunity to play around with their amazing software. Sitening, for those that don’t know, are the creators of Raven among other things. They are a very well respected Internet Marketing company as well do some very fine Web Application Development.
Tagged Link Building, raven seo, raven seo tools, seo, seo tools, sitening
Busby SEO Test or Busby SEO SPAM Test
I’ve been seeing more and more on the Busby SEO Test, and no I’m not trying to rank or win for it with this post. SEO contests in general are good for the industry, but I’m seeing how badly this one has gotten out of control with spam of all sorts. You can see the results of who’s on top at this moment in time, and just from analyzing the backlinks of the top people you can clearly see the comment spam tactics at play. This blog itself has got a lot of (pardon my french) shitty comments from contestants with the anchor text in place, and over at my buddy Joel Drapper’s blog I just notice one as well which got me digging more into the contest.So lets take a quick look into the top “performers” for the challenge, but keep in mind some of my data is from Google Canada, so depending on what data center you’re looking from it might be a little different.
I used two different tools to analyze the backlinks of the first two listed there, Yahoo Site Explorer and Backlink Watch. It took me no longer than a few minutes to sell all the blog comments these contestants have used, as well a bunch of other link spamming on sites such as DeviantArt. Now the way these contestants have used questionable tactics is not something you’d want to do for a client, or even for your own site. In the long run Google will catch onto this but for now there’s no doubt that anchor text is still the number one way to rank.
So go ahead and check out some of the contestants links from DeviantArt, blog comments and link exchanges. The comments left behind on blogs are the usualy one liners “thanks for the great information” which defeats the whole purpose of commenting on blogs, and is now a form of spam. This kind of link building gives us all a bad name.
So without getting too nasty or diving in any more into this silly contest what are your thoughts? Am I being rude and unfair? Have you been spammed by a contestant and want to vent? There is a positive and that is the example and real world results you can see from link building, good or bad.
Build Links To Your Social Media To Dominate The SERPs
One thing I haven’t noticed a lot of people talk about is building links to your social media content which can do wonders for both your flow of link juice, but also within the top 10 rankings. I offer this to my clients during a link building campaign and I’ll tell you what I tell them. Unless they have unique and quality content this won’t work out so well, or will look badly. Keep in mind that all the content in forms of words you put out there on social media sites, make sure it’s unique to avoid the ever so dreaded dupe content penalty.
Most social media sites will rank for most long tail keywords, and even for a highly competitive keyword if done right. This can be a powerful method because if you’re launching a new service or product within a tough niche, you can at least start grabbing some top search engine spots with your social media while you wait for your main site to develop some trust. A lot of these sites allow you to obtain a one way link which helps in the long run greatly. If you think about it you’re getting that link within content that’s on topic and coming from an authorative site.
Gain More Than One Top 10 Ranking:
There are so many social media sites out there I suggest you stick with the best to begin with, then venture out into the web 2.0 web and find more social sites that perhaps are designed around your niche. When I’m working with clients on a contract basis it usually involves me using social media to get information about them or their product within the top 10-20 spots in Google. This can be as simple as creating a Youtube video and naming it after the keyword you’re targeting, hell, make a few videos even. Another method is getting a Flickr picture ranked well by again titling it with the proper keywords and then doing things like sharing the picture with Flickr groups and other social photography sites. There are so many other posibilites such as the ever popular Squidoo and Hubpages which if done right can rank easily.
Facebook has recently allow business’s to create pages which I’ve seen starting to rank well for a lot of keywords. Getting your business listed with the Yellow Pages can also get your company listed in the business listings that show up at the top of a Google search page, as well within Google Maps. I’ve even seen a lot of people target their Craigslist ads with the right title and keywords which ranked very well for a lot of juicy keywords.
So you can see that the benefit of having quality content up on these sites for not only links but exposure. Now not all of the social media content you create will make it within the top 10 or even 20 spots in Google. So this is where some well crafted and cautious link building can be done to push the already weighted link up in the SERPs. Depending on where and what type of media you’re pushing you’ll want to approach the link building in a smart manor. Lets go over a few of the social media sites in the next bit here.
Building Links To Your Social Media:
Youtube – Youtube usually has little to no trouble ranking for most long tail keywords and hard to rank for terms. It’s no secret that Google loves video, owns Youtube, and it’s starting to have the same love as Wikipedia once did. Youtube videos ranks are also influenced by the rating on Youtube, and Google can tell when a video is quality and original. You can do a few simple things like social bookmarking your video to give it an extra link juice boost. Incorporating your video within your Squidoo pages, Hubpages and other social media will help bring up its quality as well give it a few links.
Squidoo – Squidoo pages are great because you can create a content rich page with not only articles, but with other forms of social media all tied in. Link Building for your Squidoo Lens is worth the time and has an abundance of different options. First off you can submit your Lens to a number of sites designed to promote Squidoo Len’s which I’ve already blogged about. This alone will greatly help with the ranking of your Lens.
Flickr – Flickr is an amazing site that is love by Google and Yahoo(I wonder why :) and provides a great way to bring some targeted traffic. Make sure to appropriatly name your photos and then join related Flickr groups to share your pictures. There are several photo sharing sites and blogs, and if you can create some photography that is not only showing off your business or product, but viral in nature. A great picture can go a long way and attract visitors from places a lot of businesses are not tapping into. A client of mine managed to attract a lot of business by taking a lot of great photo sets of a conference he went to which lead to that album ranking well and attracting a lot of search traffic. This is just one great example of how this can work for you. And if all else fails throw a few social bookmarks to the picture page to speed up the indexing process.
RSS Feed Sites – RSS feed sites have been popping up all over the place and RSS Link Building has become a great tool to gain more exposure and links. A lot of the more popular feed sites like RSS Hugger and MillionRSS are great places to have your feed profile ranked within the search engines. This is an added bonus because you’re already getting links and feed subscribers from these sites! There are also RSS based news sites that also provide another way for your media to sneak up in the search engines. Two great examples of sites like this are Aide RSS and Toluu which both give you links and their feed profile pages rank well in the search engines.
Well I hope this has given you folks some more to think about and I know I’m doing nothing but creating 10x the work load for you. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments on what you think or especially from anyone doing this in their link building campaigns.
