this week in link building

Let me start off by remembering to stop today and think about our Veterans and what they’ve done for us in the past. Most of you are off from work today, but knowing myself I can imagine a good chunk of you will still be on the grind. It’s rainy and windy outside so what better time to round up all the past couple weeks worth of link building material. There has been a lot of great articles lately and this weeks post will be chalk full of goodies to keep you busy for most of the day. Let’s start this post off from another awesome comic from Kevin & The Googlebots.

I reminded myself to find some new RSS feed directories and came across Daytimenews.com. It’s basically a RSS feed directory but with a very updated and fresh web 2.0 feel. Submissions are reviewed by a human so you cannot submit crap to the site…so admin if you’re reading this approve Linkbuildr please and thank you(lol). The site is relatively new so don’t expect much in regards to link juice just yet, but be thankful for the help it gives your content to stay in the index. They will spider your site constantly once approved and it hopefully will bring you some new readers to your blog. I don’t have any data yet on the site so I can’t tell you how well it performs, but if anyone out there is listed please let us know in the comments! You can head on over to their site and submit your RSS feed.

I’m sure most of you folks have heard about, and even used PRWeb.com’s press release distribution services. Using a press release to get the word out has long been an effective way of marketing your brand or product, and even more so it’s a great way to get some very powerful links. I’m currently writing a post entirely dedicated to free press release sites, so I thought I would get this out of the way first.

I always recommend to my clients to get the 200 dollar package they offer because it covers all your basis such as SEO friendly links and distribution to all the places that matter. You will get some kick ass links from places such as Google News and Yahoo News plust a whole host of authorative sites. Another thing to think about are the sites that scrape and use for news to blog about which can bring in a whole other set of links you wouldn’t have otherwise expected. All in all if you want an effective link building campaign this is really not to be overlooked!  Let’s take a look at all the various packages PRWeb has to offer.

With all the crazy web 2.0 sites coming out these days, and yes the ones I’m finding to link build with, it gave me the idea to write this post. If you have your own web 2.0 app to promote you have many options which luckily will bring in some very juicy links! I’m currently helping a client promote his web 2.0 site and found an abundance of resources to get your site listed. Some things to keep in mind here are the quality and uniqueness of your web 2.0 site because a lot of these places I’m going to list have a strict quality control. Click here to read Link Building For Your Web 2.0 App.

Here’s another niche link building strategy guide that is similar to what I can put together for your company, or blog. I picked the health niche because it is so vast and this will make finding a lot of resources to write about much easier. If you would like to have me map out a custom link building and social media marketing campaign for your website feel free to contact me.

Although the healt and fitness niche’s are heavily competative, there are still a lot of new ways to market your product or site. These new methods should also bring in strong, healthy links from niche related social media sites, forums and more. We’ll  first take a look at a few health directories that would be worth the time spent submitting. I usually don’t like wasting my time on these, but because it’s so competitive you don’t have much choice! Click here to read Link Building In The Health/Fitness Niche.

FeedBees is a really cool, well laid out and designed RSS Feed Directory. The feed directory was started up early this year so it’s relatively new in regards to great link juice, but already has well over 40,000 pages indexed in Google. You can submit your feed absolutely free, and to get an idea of what you’ll get, take a look at someone’s feed page. I also wanted to mention they make use of Adsense for RSS so you can enjoy 100% of the ad revenue shown in your streams.

Well I’ve got so many clients to track keywords for, most of which don’t have a blog so I cannot use the WordPress plugins that would make this part of the job easier. But thankfully a fellow Linkbuildr reader and now friend, Will Reinhardt, gave me access to his SEO Keyword Ranking tool.  I asked if I could review it out of the kindness of my heart, so this in no way influenced by money what-so-ever(so f%$! off Google :).

This tool is for one thing and one thing only…tracking your position in the search engines. I’ve used a bunch of free tools, paid tools and doing it by hand but the simplicity of SEO Keyword Ranking takes the cake. The tool tracks all the major search engines and provides reports on a time schedule, depending on how you want it. The reports are handled two ways, one within your account and secondly, straight via email all packaged in a nice and easy to read report. This is great because I can send my clients the reports automatically without worrying about it, and if I ever need to review them they’re only a few clicks away. Click here to read the rest of the review.

Ann Smarty once again has bee very active writing more and more quality articles that make doing this weekly roundup so much easier! Her article is titled Link Building Reports That Make Your Clients Happy and this is a topic I’ve never seen covered anywhere else(shame on me). Some clients could care less about seeing where the links were from, but more and more I’m getting a lot of SEO savvy clients and theyre more than happy to get the low down. One thing I wanted to bring up here just incase you miss it in her article, but that’s the free link building report offered by SEOmoz. Ann Smarty also wrote another great article called Firefox Addons To Explore Backlinks In Google Webmaster Tools and pretty well explains itself.

Link Building Best Practices recently wrote a piece An SEO Is Not A Link Builder which defines what we do a little clearer. As the link building industry continues to grow it has been increasingly defining itself in its own digital world and no longer means adding a few social bookmarks and directory links.

Most SEO’s agree that there are three components to higher search results; 1) good content, 2) onsite optimization and 3) quality link building.  However, in my opinion, most SEO’s are not link builders and most link builders are not SEOs

I’d like to congradulate Collin Lahay on his 1 year blog anniversary as well mention two great posts he’s written last week. First up was his post on Link Building With Ning which is an SEO friendly social networking platform which allows anyone to create a social network on their domain. Another social media site on the same sort of page as Squidoo or Hubpages is Qassia and he covers how to get do follow links in his post Link Building With Qassia. Last but not least was yet another great post that covers getting links on a new web 2.0 classified site called iList, click here to read Link Building With iList.

Shaun from Hobo Web wrote a great post on the length of anchor text, and as link builders we should all be aware of what is in our realm. I’ll admit I usually just had a made of number in my head of how long an anchor text should be, but since he mentions the safe length is around 8-9 words I’m still in the clear. Click here to read his post on anchor text length.

Well another week slipped by where I forgot to update one of the weeks, but that just makes room for a major update this week. It has been a good week around the web as well right here as you can tell I’ve been fairly active in posting. The way it has been going out there I feel the opportunities to get one way links is going to keep rising and rising. I’m going to be starting to consult out more to you fine folks who don’t have the time to do a lot of link building as well perhaps start a job board to find other link builders for work.

Virb has been growing steadily and in the past couple of months, it has shown significant traffic growth mainly due to its quality of content. This social network site lets you showcase off every little piece of media you have to throw at it such as videos, blogs and photos. I never looked into the site earlier until this week when I noticed a nice juicy link one of my clients was getting from their profile that they had setup. So getting to the good stuff…Virb of course has do follow within your personal blog, as well within your profile under website. Since the quality of content is high on Virb you best be expected to utilize this amazing site not for SPAM, but for what it is intended for.

This new website is called Clutter Me. The web interface is a overly easy to use system that allows you to build social media rich websites in no time, and if you like, embed do follow links to anything you’re writing about. Since Clutter Me is quite new the link juice isn’t that powerful, but the folks behind it are pushing the site very hard and within a few months your links should be worth the effort. I highly recommend building a few good webpages within Clutter Me and if you want to make a little money they’ve just opened up an affiliate program.

Elgg is one of the most popular open source social networking platforms, and for good reason. Elgg has seen a lot of development and the most recent 1.0 version is nothing to snicker at! I’ve been using it for a project and I really like what they have done with the platform in regards to features, and what I think is most important, speed due to the efficiency of code. Now I’m aware blackhats are actively exploiting the Elgg platform mainly due to one reason, everything is pretty much do follow. I’ll be straight forward and mention, as I always do, that I do not condone spamming but adding relevant comments or content to the social platform. If you do a Google search for powered by Elgg you will find well over 50,000 sites that are powered by the social networking sofware.

BlognList is a great service for getting some buzz and backlinks generated for your company or product. BlognList is like other review services such as Blogsvertise, but they go above and beyond when it comes to quality. They have an army of top notch bloggers backed with authorative blogs in almost every niche you could think of. If you’re looking to build an effective link building campaign then I highly recommend it so long as you make it worth your while. They have many packages to suite anyone’s budget, and I recommend trying out the smallest first to see the results before continueing on with your campaign.

I was browsing around the web tonight and I came across YouBundle which left me asking myself how did I ever miss it? I’ve even been planning to launch a service just like it which kind of discouraged me, but I’m still going to blog about this amazing site anyway. YouBundle is somewhat like Squidoo except it’s put together completely different, is much more social and provides a fresh look at social media.

I’ve been playing around with Social Median tonight and I REALLY like what I’m seeing. Social Median is a new way of getting customized news from around the web as well getting your news out in the world with the click of the mouse. The interface took me a little while to get used to, but once I got the hang of It I was creating custom news feeds from the great sources already within the system, and then I made my own custom news feed for link building. After a few hours I’ve realized that Social Median’s suggestive topics for news it thought I would like was spot on. I’ve now got this happily feeding me news all day on my new Blackberry Storm which makes my day a whole lot more less productive..but in a good way. I highly recommend everyone to try it out, make some news feeds and get some links plus traffic from this social networking site.

Flowgram.com is a revolutionary social media platform that allows you to combine media from many sites into one neat “Flowgram”. This allows you to create a mini presention on a subject and include all the information you need from many sites such as Youtube, Flickr and even Power Point docs! Google has really been showing some love for this site and you can get a do follow backlink to your webpage within your user profile. But with a site like this, you have to think beyond just getting that link and create some very cool and unique content pieces to promote your product, web page or just about anything you like.

I was scanning a few top rated sites lately for new places to get backlinks and came across a cool little website called Launch Feed. This new service is great for two reasons, one it’s absolutely free, as well it provides a do follow link! It’s pretty straight forward so all you have to do is submit your url, write a description and let the good times roll. If you want you can write a review or promote your page to get your readers to submit reviews for you. I’d like to thank Mubashar Iqbal for programming this out of his labour of love and making this tool for free. So if anyone needs some programming done, you can contact him over at his software companies website, Suffolk Software. So enough of my blabbing….go ahead and get yourself signed up.

Collin Lahay managed to get a great post out called Link Building With iList this week and it’s another great example of what I missed! iList is a recently new classified site with a very nice web 2.0 feel to it that allows you to get some do follow links as well promote products. I’ll take a snippet from Collin’s post here to let him explain it better….oh and if you haven’t bookmarked his site yet do it.

iList.com is a free classified ads website much like the more popular Craigslist or Gumtree. iList has a more “web2.0″ feel with their fancy buttons and simple publishing menu’s, and it kind of reminds me of Squidoo’s interface. Unlike iList’s more popular competitors, iList provides dofollow anchor text links in their classified ads. You can easily visit iList.com and create your account in seconds, and then make a classifieds listing with a link back to your site. You would then want to submit your classifieds page to the SocialMarker sites to help Google find the page quickly.

Linkers Blog made up the Top 10 Link Building Blogs Of 2008 and I was luckily and graciously approved to the list. But besides that, they have included a great list of sites that you should probably be reading on a weekly basis….that is if you want to stay ahead in this game. Hopefully with your support and my continued writing I’ll be able to make it higher up on the list for next year!

Ann Smarty, one of my favorite bloggers, has of course written another amazing post with some really solid information regarding link building for e-commerce sites. I’ve been doing a lot of this lately and was even thinking of writing a post until she beat me to the punch..but it’s for the best because she’s a much better writer!

The good folks over at SEOptimise posted a really good article entitled 30 Ways to Get Links Naturally & Stop Link Building. You may have seen this one already on Sphinn because it’s a wicked article and everyone should read it. They fuel the fire and provide some very unique ways of building links that most people are not doing these days…even me!

I’m a day late but I’ve got some good posts this week not only from myself, but from the great bloggers out there who really stepped it up this past week. I’ve been quite busy with clients and have come to wish I’ve had my own product I’m selling. I’ve really got into drop shipping lately and will show you guys soon what I’ve been up to.

If you’re like me and have a tough time keeping track of all your tasks, and getting projects done then you’ll be interested in this really cool app for your Blackberry called Viira. Viira is Blackberry GTD Software which takes the calender and tasks manager on the BB to new heights. This software makes sure you are on top of tasks that need to be done, and generally makes life easier when you know what needs to be done. You can try a free trial copy, and if you want to buy it’s only a fraction of the cost of other GTD Software at $29.99.

Agglom.com is new to me, but has started gaining rank and traffic since late August. Forgive me if the site has been around longer, but I’m using data from Alexa(god forbid). Agglom is a social bookmarking site that allows you to do the obvious, but also build sets of links related to a certain topic. This is an interesting spin on bookmarking, and it makes for a unique site to help promote and save your web links. Now the links you add to your lists are not SEO friendly, so the only benefit here is gaining niche related traffic.

OpenZine is a social publishing platform with browser based tools that provides regular people with the essential tools to create really amazing things, display it with equal quality and enables them to socially share, control and manage their ideas. The OpenZine platform is a really unique and amazing project by two brothers who had a vision and made it happen. I’ve been experimenting with setting up my own little zine, and I’ve got to say the platform is really on the cutting edge…almost visionary. You can of course get a do follow link from your author bio, and all the links within your Zine are do follow.

I just discovered Orble while I was browsing backlinks for a blog, and this is my favorite way of discovering new ways to build links. It makes my life easier finding new content to write about while building links for the site. Orble is a network for bloggers to promote their blogs, attract more readers all while getting help from professional bloggers. What do I mean by getting help from professional bloggers? Orble’s staff provides coaching and helpful feedback so you don’t have to learn by trial and error….we all need help from time to time. Orble also has a mentoring program if you’re new, or just having a hard time getting your blog off the ground. Orble is designed so that good writing gets the attention it deserves. Each blog is promoted on the Orble network helping you attract more readers than would be possible elsewhere with a stand-alone blog. Being part of a blogging network also helps you attract more Search Engine traffic.

Collin Lahay of course had another killer post that puts me to shame! He talked about link building with Work.com as well use it as a place to promote unique and quality content. This service is open for abuse a little bit, so I’m making sure my readers do not rape this great service, but rather use it for what it is.

Work.com is a pagerank 6 authority site that features a lot of how-to guides on many subjects.  The site looks professional, so I took the time to have a client of mine write two high quality how-to guides to publish on the site including a link back to our site.

Search Engine Roundtable put out a great article called Internal Linking Tactics. It covers the various latest methods in sculpting the flow of link juice within a site, which has been very effective. It’s an easy thing to do, and all you need to do is setup a system of internal linking that works best with your website. If you’re using WordPress, I highly recommend a plugin called aLinks.

Why even care about your internal linking? Because you can help yourself with your own site, so why waste one of the easiest link building opportunities out there. Using nofollow and other techniques for “PageRank sculpting” has risen in awareness over the past year. It’s even been recommended by Google. How does it work, when do you want to do it, and is it worth the time? Techniques and case studies will be shown. Don’t forget the anchor text. What you say in your links can matter! And saying it in a variety of different ways might be better than using the same exact words over and over. Tips and advice about writing for internal links. Don’t forget the humans, when it comes to internal linking. You still need to have links showing in a way that benefits your human visitors. Meanwhile, you might have to convince the humans in your IT department, upper management or other stakeholders about why recommended internal link tactics deserve support.

Last but not least was a post from JR over at Get Internet Marketing Strategies. JR has been writing a lot lately and I’ve quickly become a fan of his work. I highly recommend you guys to his blog because he writes good content that actually is useful! So back on topic….His post called 11 More Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Site covers a few social bookmarking sites that you most likely know, but he had a bunch I’ve never even heard of. Keep up the good work mate!

That’s it for this week and remember you can leave me tips in the comments or Email me with new link building tips. I give full credit so make sure to send along any urls or anchor text’s you’d like in with your post! I hope everyone has a good productive week and that you all move up in the SERPs.