link building

Building Links & Driving Traffic with How To Posts

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When you are looking to build links and drive traffic, one of the time tested methods that continues to work is creating “how to” style posts. In this article, we’ll look at some examples and discuss how to get the most out of the tactic, how to take advantage of seasonal search/traffic volume, and some [...]

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How to Build Website Trust and Authority

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While Google’s Panda update has many different aspects, one thing is certain: Google is looking for signals of trust, authority, and real branding. They are looking for signals that thin content mfa sites and thin content affiliates will have a hard time building. If you are a website or business owner, what are some thing [...]

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How to Create an Amazing About Us Page

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About Us pages are one of the essential elements of a trusted website (see How to Make Your Website Seem More Legitimate); however, most people dread writing them or treat them as an after thought. But, with a little creativity, you can turn an ordinary “About Us” page into something really interesting. In this post, [...]

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Article Marketing in a Post Panda World

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Article marketing has been one of the foundations of link building ever since I got started in SEO. However, since sites like Ezinearticles and Suite 101 have taken a huge loss in ranking and traffic as a result of the panda update, should article marketing still be a part of your overall strategy? We need [...]

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Linkbait Failure – Not Understanding the Need For Instant Gratification

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Whenever I see someone else’s linkbait that fails, one of the common reasons is the failure to understand the need for instant gratification. I came across a text book example of this recently so I thought I would share it with you.

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Does the Number of Ads on Your Website Affect Your Linkability

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Does the number of ads on your website affect it’s linkability? IMHO, yes it does. I do most of my reading on my iPad, using either Ziteapp or Instapaper. Both of these tools do a good job of stripping the content down to its most essential elements and displaying it in a readable format. Unfortunately [...]

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How to Build Links with Images

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The following is part of a series of posts on image optimization. In this post we’re going to be talking about using image optimization as a link building technique.

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Link Building – Creating Encyclopedic Content

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While SEOs are well known for hating Wikipedia for its truthiness factor, as a whole, you have to acknowledge that, at some level, the content strives to be encyclopedic in nature. It’s this encyclopedic and non commercial quality that makes it linkworthy. When building my own websites or working with clients, one of the areas I feel [...]

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Link Building – Creating Exceptional Content for Boring Topics

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Whenever you’re at a conference and you speak to a Google Engineer about link building, they will almost always default back to “create exceptional content that is linkworthy” or some similar concept. I’ve been speaking with people at conferences, both clients and potential clients, and mentioning the same thing for years. The response I often [...]

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The Art and Science of Writing Good Titles

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Crafting a good title for your pages or blog posts is a problem many people struggle with. Do you focus on keywords or on attention grabbing formulas? Hopefully this post will give you some insight into how to write better titles. The difficulty with crafting good titles is that it’s part science and part art, and you have to [...]

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Badges & Widgets Can Take Your Rankings to the Top!

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SEOmoz has mentioned it before in their link building videos that badges and widgets are a great way to get links, but can they really help you get to the top for very competitive terms?  I believe so and have some proof to demonstrate it.  Most badges I have seen are some type of image [...]

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You’re All Wrong! Paid Links From Offtopic Sites Do Count

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“Paid links from off topic sites get devalued and flagged.” A common claim by otherwise savvy SEOs such as Ross Hudgens. Ross, would you take three links from the Wall Street Journal if its reporters write about internet marketing? Would you buy those links?

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Buying Links to Third Party Websites

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Last week I was having a discussion on Twitter about whether or not  some links were bought. Quite a few people were confused about how you can use link buying to your advantage when you buy links to a website you don’t own (aka a third party). I thought I’d do a little ed-ju-macating and [...]

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Is There Any Value in Getting Links From Directories

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Today’s post is answer to a question from Curedream: Is there really any value in getting links from the Yahoo directory I’m going to move that up a bit and tackle directories in general.  In my opinion, yes, there is value in getting your website listed in some directories–but not all. The trick is figuring [...]

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When To Pay Top Dollar for Copy

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It took Leo Tolstoy six years to craft the 460,000-word War and Peace. A cheap copywriting service could churn out as many words for your website for just $9,200 (at 2 cents a word) over the course of a few weeks. Added to this, standards of literacy and attention spans on the web are plummeting. [...]

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WordPress SEO: How to Maximize Your Internal Link Strategy

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While there are hundreds of thousands of posts on maximizing external links for your blog, like a red headed step child no one pays much attention to internal links. Internal links can be very powerful in helping you distribute the link equity that those external links bring, and they can decrease your bounce rate and [...]

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Checking for Broken Links and Link Rot and the Importance of Good Site Architecture

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Recently I’ve been experimenting with a plugin for checking broken links, on several of my blogs, and I’m fascinated by what I’ve discovered.

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Five Search Queries to Find Sponsorship Link Opportunities

And regardless of the fact that they are paid, Google doesn’t seem to mind them so long as they are on-topic and coming from a reputable website. As the title suggests, this “link buy” comes in the form of sponsoring an event or website. The trick is to find sponsorship opportunities that are in your corner of the web (read: on-topic).

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Link Building and Development Mistakes – Treetrunks and Houses on Stilts

When someone asks me to look at their backlinks there are two problems that continually popup, websites supported by lots of tiny weak links, or websites supported by one single overwhelming link. Neither case is pretty, and if your website is like the house pictured above it’s easy to see what a precarious position you’re [...]

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