I noticed last night that Google’s visible page rank had disappeared for several tools I use. I looked around a little bit but could not find any tool that was working. I think the SEO community has been looking towards this for quite some time, as people have put far too much emphasis on Google’s visible page rank to the point where an entire economy (Text Link Industry) has been developed around a websites Page Rank and the associated value you can extract from selling links.

I think the guys from Majestic SEO and SEOMoz are both quite pleased to see this change, as they both have built into their link spider the ability to score the link value of a website based upon somewhat similar characteristics to that of Google’s Page rank.

I guess we will see how this all plays out over the coming days, weeks, months or years. I think the removal of visible page rank has been long over due.

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If we are going to understand the latest nuance of online searching we need to know just which fundamentals we’re dealing with. If we are going to understand how to fine-tune and adjust our Web-based lives we need to know something about the tools we’re planning to use.

We’ll start from the announcement of “the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools,” as announced in July on www.bing.com.

According to the information provided at the time, “After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the Webmaster Tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing.” That’s the word from Anthony M. Garcia, Senior Product Manager for Bing Webmaster Tools.

New and Improved

The goal, according to the Webmaster Center, was to change everything, or, in the staff’s words “hit the reset button and rebuild the tools from the ground up.” The latest tool was announced by Garcia in the same forum on Dec. 14. He wrote that a new Inbound Links feature was released to provide “registered site owners the ability to easily & intuitively retrieve data about links to their sites. “

Bing apparently got a lot of feedback from SEO pros and Web-site owners about “the importance of this data to better understand how their sites are ranked in Bing.”

Users can now learn details about the number of inbound links over time, with details on URL and anchor text. In addition, users can export this link data so it can be studied offline.

Garcia wrote, “It is important to note that the count of inbound links will be based on content stored in the Bing index vs. a complete, comprehensive count of links between every page on the Internet.” This could be a crucial distinction for many site owners and other industry professionals.

Building Blocks

New top-floor tools such as the just-announced Inbound Links item have to be supported by a strong and well-constructed foundation and lower floors. That was the goal when Bing “hit the reset button” a few months ago. Developers were aiming for a simpler experience that was also more intuitive.

The focus, according to Bing, was on “three key areas: crawl, index and traffic.” The new work included Index Explorer and Submit URLs, which basically provide more information about Bing’s crawls and indexes, but also gives the user improved control. Garcia wrote:

Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages.

In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

At this point we should have a better-than-average idea of what the developers and managers intended with the new Bing Webmaster Tools. But if we don’t understand the overall changes made we might find that we’re a bit confused about the latest innovation. Let’s take a look back at some foundation material.

Back Then

In previous incarnations, Bing was Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search. This new “decision engine” came under the broader category of Web search engine and was introduced to the general public in San Diego in May 2009. It was online a few days later.

That first product included such changes as search suggestions listed as queries are entered. According to information from the company Bing also included a list of related searches based on Powerset semantic technology. (Microsoft bought Powerset in 2008.) Bing was also introduced as the muscle behind Yahoo! Search.

To get to the roots of Bing predecessors you have to go back an entire lifetime (in Internet terms) to 1998 and 1999. At that time, the company offered MSN Search and gradually added such improvements as self-constructed search-engine results that could be updated on a regular basis. Serious upgrades were moved out in 2004 and 2005, with results made available to other search portals.

In 2006, the world was introduced to Windows Live Search, the replacement for MSN Search. This new iteration used such tabs as Web, images, news, desktop etc. It was at this point that Microsoft no longer used Picsearch to provide images within the service. In-house developers created their own image-search mechanisms.

A year later the company effectively changed the playing field by moving the search products away from Windows Live services. The new product became Live Search, under the Platform and Systems division of the company. It’s important to also understand that Live Search was integrated with Microsoft adCenter at this time.

There’s More

Some of the key elements in the transformation of Microsoft search tools (from Windows Live Search and MSN Search to Bing) include:

• 2008 – Separate search categories/tools for books and academic subjects were discontinued. These were integrated into the overall search program
• 2008 – Live Search Macros discontinued
• 2009 – Live Product Upload discontinued
• 2009 – MSN QnA lived briefly between February and May

It’s also essential for industry watchers to understand the significance of the change from the “Live” moniker. This decision was made by a company that was concerned about brand image and brand awareness. Bing was born.

So, we’ve come from the last century and MSN/Live Search to Bing, in about 10 or 11 years. Where does that leave us? Well, in 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo! signed an agreement to replace Yahoo! search tools with Bing. The contract is intended to last 10 years.

Not only has Bing become the power behind another brand it has resurrected Microsoft’s share of the search market. Industry figures show that the big company’s market share was declining until Bing gave it the adrenaline rush needed. In October 2010 Bing was in the top five among search engines by volume.

Painful Birth?

Was the transition from Live to Bing painful for users? It would be necessary to survey a majority of those folks to get an accurate picture of what the change meant. Microsoft and the people behind Bing introduced the change as good news.

In July, Garcia wrote, “We have good news for all the veteran users of the Bing Webmaster Tools. Your existing Webmaster Center accounts have been automatically upgraded to the new tools. This means that starting today, you’re already a registered user of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. There’s no need to create a new account, change ownership verification codes, or re-enter site data. If you don’t have a current account, you can easily sign-up and register your sites to begin using the new tools.”

A few veterans have classified Bing Webmaster Tools as good, if not the best. There were some preliminary problems with Bing reporting targeted United States Web sites as being United Kingdom sites. The problem seemed to be with specific tags that have the letters “gb” in them. This was written about on SEORankings by founder Wesley LeFebvre, based in Seattle.

At the time, LeFebvre asked if some of these sites were suffering in the organic-ranking category because of the mistaken information. He also questioned the validity of Bing, Google and Yahoo! local rankings in light of this information. LeFebvre set a goal of finding out if other organic search engines use this tag.

In October, Steve Tullis wrote on the Webmaster Center blog “In keeping with our themes of rapid change and responding to input and feedback from the webmaster community, we are working on future feature planning for the Bing webmaster tools and we would like to hear your thoughts in a few areas.”

Tullis discussed Crawl-Delay and asked several specific questions about support and control in this area. He asked users and webmasters if they preferred to have crawl-delay supported in robots.txt, in addition to several other pointed questions.

The door to getting assistance with Bing Webmaster Tools is on the Bing Webmaster Center Help page. While that may seem obvious, it doesn’t hurt to make contact with the source somewhere in your search for information about new versions, upgrades and additions. Judging from initial reports from both the company and a few users, the new tools are workable and the Inbound Links addition is absolutely essential.

It’s a bit early to try any detailed comparisons on Bing Webmaster Tools and its Inbound Links structure. But rest assured there are plenty of people out there who will be providing useful reports.

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The network that can carry a Web site to the top is built with exposure to a specific group of people. Target audiences are the crucial factor for anyone considering directory submissions.

Assume you have a site that offers Product X and related services. A particular sector of the online population will go to search engines and use Product X or one of the related services as a keyword for their search. Your goal is to have a Web site and its link at the top of the search engine when this target group searches. This could mean significant traffic to your site and consequently, significant income for you.

Link building is not a quick way to make a dollar or two. It takes careful planning and serious effort. You should also make use of several of the quality directories in your chosen area, whether these are link directories, article directories or a combination of both. You should also know about the different kinds of links so you can make the most efficient use of your time and effort.

Here are some key categories:

• No Follow – Search engines treat the no-follow directions as “a signal that link popularity should not be passed through that link.” (Wikipedia) This is a “way of not vouching for the quality of the site being linked to, and is heavily used by sites that allow users to insert links into content that isn’t reviewed before being published.”
• Authority – You may have to buy these links from sites such as Google Search, Yahoo Directory etc. These sites rank for top-level keywords.
• Directory – The best advice is to submit only three or four times a month to directories. Don’t flood them!! Some people who work with SEO think directory links are the best way to go but they may not be as strong as relevant, one-way links.
• One-Way – This will be one of the most effective ways to get rankings. Think about quality content and link bait. Don’t get trapped into sponsored links and advertising. Try forums for focused content and audiences.
• Press Release – Press release submission services and sites are leaders in the field. Try PR.com, for example.
• Reciprocal – This type of link is rather easy to get but is not necessarily the most effective link category. Think about this: Reciprocal links are usually an equal exchange – you get what you give in quality and reliability.
• Pre-sell Page – These might be a little harder to find. Contact webmasters. The entire page is your content so they can be excellent for SEO.
• Social Media – This has become a real buzzword in the online community over the past couple of years. With this type of link you need to think about people getting together and having a conversation. That’s the key word today – conversation.
• RSS/Blog – Think about syndication. Start your blog with quality content and make sure you have RSS, Atom etc.

This is only a short list!! There are many other types of links that you can use to build your presence. Use these ideas and learn more about: site-wide links; three-way link; links to and from media outlets such as radio stations, television stations and newspaper companies; edu and gov links; article submission links.

Not Just the Traffic, Silly!

No matter how you go about getting linked up with others who have similar interests, stimulating traffic is only part of the story. Remember, we mentioned conversations earlier. Success in the online world is about connections, of course, but after you make the connection you need to continue the conversation.

Of course, it’s tempting to just get started, try to make money quickly and move on to something else. A few people have been fortunate enough to do this. You may find that success has a short life span when you flood the Web with information and hope 1 percent or 2 percent come back to you. However, if you have a little more patience than the next guy, use some intelligence and focus on the right link or article directories you may find yourself building a more long-term business.

You may as well begin with the free directories when you begin the process of submitting your site link to a links directory. Many of these will establish good connections in sufficient numbers. It pays, however, to be selective when submitting to the many free directory sites. You could sign on with a link-submission service if you have funds to pay the fees. Be very selective with this method because some services might flood the Web with your link and you are looking for quality connections.

People interested in your particular service or product will be looking for your sign and a brief explanation of what you offer. Those who are searching for something entirely different probably won’t come into your “store.” Your choice of a few select link or article directories is like putting up the right sign on your “main street business.” In fact, it may be better if they don’t. You need to focus on the customers with real potential.

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The nofollow tag is used to tell some search engines (*cough*Google*cough*) that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s search engine ranking. It was originally intended to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam. Spam comments were the nofollow tag’s original targets: spam comments on blogs were used to get back links and try to squeeze a few drops of link juice from as many places as possible. By making comment links nofollow, the webmaster is in effect saying, “I am in no way vouching for the quality of the place this link goes. Don’t give them any of my link juice. Maybe it’s a good site, but I’m not taking chances.”

Nofollow links are not meant for preventing stuff from being indexed or for blocking access. The ways to do this are by using the robots.txt file for blocking access, and using on-page meta elements that specify on a page by page basis what a search engine crawler should (or should not) do with the content that’s on the crawled page.

Nofollow was born in 2005, and since that time, in the SEO arms race between the search engines and those who want to game them, websites started selectively using the nofollow tag to “sculpt” page rank for pages within their own site. In other words, a link going to an internal page that was ticking over nicely could be made into a nofollow link in an attempt to “conserve” PageRank juice to give to another internal page that was just starting out, or struggling, and needed some help.

Well, Google frowns on this, insisting that you’re better off in the long run to use links to your site’s pages but not to selectively use the nofollow tag in an attempt to juice up the pages you think need a boost. According to Matt Cutts, the only time you should use nofollow is when you cannot or don’t want to vouch for the content of a site. An example would be a link added by an outside user (say, in a comment thread) that you don’t trust. Cutts suggested that unknown users leaving links on your guestbook page should automatically have their links nofollowed.
Right, so what does this have to do with paid content?

The nofollow tag was supposed to squash paid links, which Google hates.

Paid content companies take advantage of Google’s emphasis on domain authority, by buying up trusted sites like eHow (purchased by the seemingly insatiable Demand Media) and dumping lots and lots of esoteric content into it. Why do they do this? They get the domain authority, and the esoteric content helps ensure that when someone, somewhere searches for an article on, say, how to make a butterfly shaped cake, the content that they paid a content writer a couple of bucks for will show up at the top of the search engine results. In other words, they’re targeting the proverbial “long tail.”

How do these sites know what content to buy? They have algorithms that comb through keywords and keyword combinations and determine where there are gaps in information. Then the content buyers commission writers to write content specifically to fill those gaps. You may have heard the statistic that 20 to 25% of queries on Google have never been searched before. That’s a huge, huge number of queries. The more of those queries you can anticipate and answer, the more hits your site will get over the long term.

While link spam and comment spam were clear attempts at short term efforts for sites to claw their way to the top of the search engine rankings, and were relatively easy to squash using nofollow tags, paid content is more of a long term strategy, and it’s not clear what, if anything Google can do about it.

What seems to be happening is that sites like Twitter are kneeling down before their Google overlords (as one side of the story goes) and automatically making even the most harmless links (such as your own link to your own website on the “Bio” part of your Twitter profile) nofollow links. That has seriously ticked off a lot of long term Twitter users who legitimately poured in lots of very real, original content and can now no longer get any link love from that Bio link, even though it’s from them, to their very own site. When this happened, the metaphors about Google and Twitter ran rampant: “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” “shutting the barn door after the horse gets out,” “cutting off its nose to spite its face,” etc.

The strategy seems to be that if nofollow links are being used as they were intended (well, as Google intended anyway), sites that are all promotion and no content would have a harder way getting to the top of the search engine results pages. Google’s fear is that paid content will game the system when it comes to odd or unusual searches, and the person who really does devote his life to making the world’s best butterfly-shaped cakes will lose out to the paid content sites who had writers or videographers hack together a 5-step instructional page or video.

Whether it will work or not is yet to be seen. As for now, paid content sites are doing pretty well for themselves. And the search engines that cater to them, like Ask.com, which wraps a few “real” sites in with sponsored results, are doing pretty well too. From February 2010 to March 2010, Ask.com’s share of search engine traffic went from 2.84% to 3.44%, while the traffic for the other (and admittedly much larger) search engines stayed relatively flat. Have a look at the screen shot of Ask.com’s results for “How do I bake a butterfly shaped cake” to see for yourself the influence of paid content on this search engine.

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If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you might be scratching your head and saying, “What?”

We’ve come down hard on link exchanges for the purpose of building your Google PageRank or search engine standing, and there’s good reason for it. It started out as a way to cheat to get to the top. You give some links, and you get some back. It sounds harmless, and when done “organically” it’s not just harmless, it’s a great way to boost your position in the search engine rank pages (SERPs). Say you run a blog about motorcycle gear and you’ve been at it for awhile, so you’ve built up some history. You might find some of the site you wish would link to you (but that may never know you exist) and simply ask if they would link to your site. Quite often the answer is “yes.” Most legitimate websites have enough good will that they’ll give a promising newcomer a little help.

However, in between the link farms, which are created solely to increase back links regardless of relevancy or reputation, and doing it the old fashioned way by asking sites to link to you, there are some programs that walk a middle path. They may have a legitimate website where site owners can categorize their site and find other sites that are about the same (or nearly the same) topic. For example, such a site might have a category for cooking blogs and another category for political blogs, another for sites on antique book appraising, and a bunch more categories.

The idea is that each day you’ll go to your category or one that’s closely related, look at several sites, and click a button that gives that site some link love by placing a link to it. And every day a bunch of other sites in your niche will do the same thing and hopefully leave you some back links in exchange.

Is this “cheating”? Will search engines penalize you for this?

It’s hard to say.

In the screen shot you can see part of Google’s Webmaster guidelines that kind of / sort of address this. Clearly, exchanging links for the sake of links regardless of relevancy or quality is not good. Google will penalize your site for this.

On the other hand, it says that “link schemes” can damage your standing and include among “link schemes”

Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

The important word in that statement is “excessive.” How do you define “excessive”?

One way that link exchanges may seem excessive has less to do with their sheer numbers and more to do with their relevancy. If you run a site about organic gardening and exchange links with a couple of, ahem, “adult entertainment” blogs, you’re doing much more harm than good.

If, however, you participate in a link exchange with a relevant category and you find a few sites that you wouldn’t have found otherwise, that are good fits for your site as far as relevancy and quality, then there’s no real problem. If you had found those sites organically, you probably would have asked for links from them anyway. You just had a little help finding them.

Look at it this way: If Google gave no influence to back links, either good or bad, or if Google didn’t exist, would you link to those sites and ask for links to yours? Or alternatively, would you link to those sites even if you had no idea if they would link to you? If the answer is yes, then you’re probably OK.

If you run a site and you have, say three hours a day you devote to research and / or link building (I wish!) then you probably shouldn’t devote more than one of those hours to participating in a targeted link exchange. Spend the other two working on other off-page optimization like searching out new sites to evaluate and possibly ask for back links. That way you won’t risk an explosion in link numbers that would tip off the search engine gods and make them think you’re up to some illegitimate link-swapping.

When you find a relevant site that you really like, and you read it and are convinced it would be a good back link to have, asking directly for that back link means a lot more than the three or four links you might get on an “I’ll link to you if you link to me” site. For one thing, it’s great to get that vote of confidence when someone likes your site enough to ask for a link. The first time some cool site contacts you to ask for a back link is a milestone of sorts.

And another thing to consider is this: how many high quality sites do you know of that have link exchange “badges” – particularly above the fold – that indicate their participation in link exchange sites? Not many, I’d bet. While they’re not exactly signs of desperation, they show exactly what you’re up to, and indicate that maybe you can’t get back links any other way. Fair? Of course not. But that’s the reality you have to deal with.

Link farms and paid link exchanges really will harm your site, no question. Targeted link exchange programs where you give and ask for links based on relevancy and perceived quality can be OK, as long as you don’t depend “excessively” on these sites for links.

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Online public relations campaigns can be used as very effective off-page SEO. Done well, they can increase targeted traffic to your site. A good PR effort for SEO should include keyword optimized press releases to increase the visibility of your brand in the marketplace and get you more leads and sales.

In the best of all worlds, you would use both “push” and “pull” marketing, where you push your message to the media your prospects tend to use most. The pull strategy “pulls” prospects to your site by making your site more visible in media where your prospects already visit. The end result can be more traffic, higher placement on SERPs, more organic, high quality, inbound links to your site, and press releases being picked up by top industry publications.

You probably already know that there are bunches of press release websites. A lot of them have free basic service, with extra “premium” services you can purchase. You’re best off using PR sites (free or paid) that have a Google PageRank of at least 4. PR sites with no PageRank might have been blacklisted for spam attacks, so you should definitely stay away from them. Choose PR sites that allow you to optimize for search engines with anchor text links, tagging, etc. Also choose PR sites that don’t use NoFollow tags. You want the search engines to be able to follow the links in your press release, otherwise you don’t get a PR benefit.

Perhaps the top two free press release websites are free-press-release.com and prlog.org.

Free-press-release.com has a Google PageRank of 5 and its Alexa ranking is 3,547 (Remember that Alexa Ranking is like golf – the lower the better.). Granted, this isn’t the sleekest, best looking site out there, but it does get traffic. The categories are pretty broad, as you can see in the screen shot from the “Computers” section. And some of the press releases are good and some aren’t so good. On this site you can place banners pointing to your site on the press release. Since the PageRank is 5, any inbound links you get will be valuable. This site has free basic service, but you can buy “premier” service for $1 per press release or “custom” service for $30 per press release. The custom service gives you extras like active hyperlinks in the news body and absence of advertisements and related press releases when your press release is displayed. You can go to free-press-release.com’s pricing and services page to see the details.

PRLog.org has a PageRank of 5 and Alexa rating of 16,551. It is a straightforward website without a lot of goodies, but it delivers. It distributes free to Google News and other search engines, lets you have links, and is well optimized for search engines. You can also schedule press releases. This is a free-only site, so there’s no paid upgrade. The second screen shot gives you a taste of what it looks like.

If you plan on going with a paid service from the get-go, then you should consider PRNewsWire.com. It has a PageRank of 8 and an Alexa ranking of 7,508. This is the newswire used by the largest number of journalists. It costs $195 for an annual subscription, and there are add-ons you can buy on top of that. You can see what it looks like in the screen shot.

Getting press coverage is more valuable to you than a paid ad. But it isn’t an automatic process. When you notice that your press release has been picked up, it’s a good idea to contact the journalist responsible for picking it up if possible. You could even offer him / her exclusive releases in the future. Building relationships with journalists and bloggers in your niche is the best way to get the most from your press releases.

But your press releases won’t get picked up by anyone unless they actually convey an item of news and are well written. Know what your audience is hungry for. That involves knowing who your audience is, and what tone of press release connects with them better. Your newsworthy item should be relevant, and it should be news, as in, new information. It’s a good idea to research trends in search engines, particularly with regard to your industry. Knowing the hot topics and being able to tie your press releases in with them is very helpful in getting your press releases picked up.

Your press release should have a focused topic and keywords so it will rank better in the search engines. It’s important to keep it to one topic per release. Don’t dilute your key points by trying to get too much across in one press release. It’s tempting to want to include every cool thing that’s happened, but if you do that, your press release will almost certainly receive less attention.

Images are good for click through rates with press releases, increasing them by around 20%. Images give you more suction with journalists and bloggers who like any extras that are relevant and help get the point across. Those images should have relevant filenames too. People will discover images on image searches, and that will send them to the release and ultimately (hopefully) to your website. If the PR site you’ve sent your press release to archives press releases permanently, then you’re addressing “long tail” image searches as well.

Videos are helpful too. It takes time to add good video to a press release, but when it’s done with skill, time spent on the page can go up dramatically. People are embracing a richer media experience, and that includes video. This technique isn’t used all that much yet, but media pundits predict that videos in press releases (assuming they’re good and actually add to the experience) will become very popular in the future. But right now you can use it to help yours stand out from the herd.

Ideally your press release should have three anchor links: one to your home page; one to a product page; and one to a blog post. Once a reader reaches a blog post, you have a way of interacting more informally and intimately with that reader. All images in your press release should be alt-tagged appropriately. Some sites allow you to customize the URL string, and given the opportunity, you should do so with relevant keywords in the URL string. Your description tag should be keyword rich as well, and of course, the title of your press release, which will become the title tag of the page, is very important for on-page SEO.

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Link building also sometimes goes by the name of “offsite optimization.” It is very important to your SEO efforts, and it’s also one of the most time and labor intensive. You can’t wish other webmasters into linking to your site, and when they do, what anchor text are they using? How will you get inbound links to deep pages in your content?

OK, sure: great content is important. But who has time to wait around for the world to finally discover your great content? You need a great plan to go along with your great content. Consider link building as a vital business strategy for your website’s long term success. It has to be integrated into your standard business practice and regularly tended to. Here is a checklist to determine if you’re doing what you need to in order to continually build up your constellation of links.

1. The easy stuff. Submit your site to DMOZ and the other standard directories. Submit your content for syndication and submit the occasional press release when it’s newsworthy. Create RSS feeds and submit it to feed lists.

2. If you have a mailing list of happy customers, thank them and offer them a free benefit for helping spread the word on a new product page. Give them link text that they can use in their own home pages and blogs. The freebie can be a coupon for free shipping on their next order, a free e-book download, or something similar.

3. Make sure that every page on your site has a “link to this page” box. This will make it easy for people to create deep links with correct keywords.

4. Offer a free web tool or script that performs a service and links back to your site. Make sure you have at least one keyword in the link text.

5. Find out who links to your competitor. Using a backlink competitor tool (as in the screen shot) can help. There’s nothing wrong with contacting sites that link to your competitor and asking for a back link. Be polite about it, and you’ll be amazed how many sites will agree.

6. Stay away from link swapping and link buying. These practices will hurt your site’s PageRank and SERP standing. Link buying can get you banned from Google altogether.

7. Do you have the time to devote to link building strategies? If not, seriously consider outsourcing this work to a reputable SEO business that has a good track record of getting links. If you do have the time, build that time into your schedule, because it is very important to the long term health and growth of your site.

8. Keep a written record of the back links you pick up and what page they link to. This will benefit you in numerous ways. For one, it will help you judge which pages are most popular. It may point up deficiencies in pages that aren’t getting much link love, and it will let you know when your pace of back link building lags, indicating that you need to step up the effort.

9. While back links are SEO gold, internal link building is important too. Don’t neglect this aspect of your SEO strategy.

10. Make sure there are links to your site on all the social profiles you have for your business or website. Build a link into your email signature, and on forums and comment threads that allow it use a link to your site in some of your comments, but by no means all of them. If comments are monitored and it looks like the only purpose for your comment is trolling for back links (Comments like, “Great post! I hope you’ll stop by my site at http://www.myawesomewebsite.com”), then you might get booted off the site.

11. Offer to write a guest post on a blog you admire that’s relevant to your website. This is a great way to squeeze yourself some healthy link juice.

12. Don’t get links from sites that themselves link out to SEO related sites like link building software, link building clubs, paid link building, and SEO forums.

13. Don’t get links from sites that discuss Google PageRank in their ad sections. These have a whiff of desperation about them that Google can sniff out easily.

At the root of all this is knowing why you’re building links and what you want to get out of the process. If you do it right, you can get more traffic to your site, better SERP position, higher PageRank, and a healthier bottom line for your business. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the things a webmaster has to do to keep his or her site in top form and attracting all the traffic it deserves. There’s social media strategy that requires time and effort, on-page SEO to be tended to, link building, and all the while if it’s an e-commerce site, you have to actually run the business too!

Most webmasters have to map out the tasks specifically: “Twitter / Facebook updates every day by noon; 30 minutes on link building strategy every day after lunch; 30 minutes monitoring competing sites every morning first thing;” etc. So many of these things seem like things you can easily do on the side, but they’re important enough to require your full attention, and you could easily let them slip unless you write them into your work schedule. Good content, good strategies, and good discipline are what it takes, and no, there really aren’t any shortcuts.

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Link building is still one of the most important factors in your search engine results page (SERP) rankings and in your Google PageRank and will be from the foreseeable future. Links are still the fundamental connectors on the web, and legitimate links are still a great way to judge importance of a site and just how trustworthy a site is. Google’s search algorithm has learned to devalue purchased or traded links and emphasizing trusted, genuine links. And when those links are further bolstered by the vintage of the domain, user data, and other factors that are hard to fake, that’s when SERP rankings rise.

15 Effective Link Building Methods

Here are 15 great ways to build up the kind of links that will increase your PageRank and your SERP position.

1. People love to link to lists. People like to Digg lists. So include lists. They have an air of authority, and they’re fairly easy to write in many contexts. If the top 10 how-tos have been done to death in your opinion, why not list the top 10 myths about your area of expertise?
2. Speaking of lists, you could create a list of top 10 gurus or authority sites. Sometimes this even results in the guru giving you a back link. Cool.
3. You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating until everyone gets it: write good content that is easy to understand, is spelled correctly, and is free of grammatical mistakes.
4. Give your site an understandable privacy policy and “about” section. This makes your site appear trustworthy, as does a mug shot of yourself. If you need help creating a privacy policy, the Better Business Bureau has easy to follow templates at http://www.bbbonline.org/Privacy/sample_privacy.asp
5. Consider using a pay-per-click ad campaign. It will get relevant traffic to your site, and regardless of how people find your site, if they like it they’ll at least come back, and may well link to you.
6. Syndicate articles at ezinearticles, eHow, GoArticles, and similar sites. Syndicate a press release and send it to some reasonably influential bloggers and journalists. But make sure that it’s a press release that’s actually about something newsworthy, or it will go straight to the circular file. If you track who picks up your press releases you can contact them directly to offer exclusive news.
7. Link to sites in the news in your niche. To find them, do a Google news search on your niche or keywords, as you can see in the screen shot for news searches on 401k investing.
8. Build local (geographical) links by joining the Better Business Bureau, asking for a link from the local chamber of commerce, or submitting your link to relevant government offices.
9. Answer (or ask) questions on Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups and provide links to resources that are relevant.
10. Create a Squidoo lens and link to expert documents and popular tools in your niche. You can also create a link back to your site.
11. If you participate in any forums, check which ones allow you to leave signature links or profile links. Don’t do this without asking first, or you’ll incur the entire forum’s wrath. But a high number of forums do allow signature links or profile links.
12. Write relevant product reviews or product lists on Amazon, mentioning your background in the niche and including a link in your reviewer profile, and review products on sites like ePinions.
13. If you really think you can keep it regularly updated with fresh content, start a blog, link to other blogs, and comment on other blogs. Also list it in some of the better blog directories, like bestoftheweb.org (http://blogs.botw.org/).
14. If you can afford $25 or $50 in prize money, hold a contest. Contests attract links and are a cheap form of advertising.
15. Use your face-to-face relationships to create linking relationships. Trade conferences are great places to find and talk to industry leaders, politicians, and the occasional celebrity. Sometimes the cost of a one-day registration can pay for itself in traction you’ll get from interviews and pictures.

What NOT to do

And for good measure, here’s another link: 5 really bad ways to get links.

1. Buy links. Once Google realizes what you’ve done, they’ll ban you, as will the other search engines. You’ll have to claw your way back into their good graces over a fairly long period of time to get indexed again.
2. Swap links. While not quite as blatantly dishonest as buying links, you’re still getting together with others to squeeze link juice from a stone. You’ll at least get penalized and at worst get de-listed by the search engines.
3. Spam every forum you can find with links, regardless of whether they allow signature links. The few links you get this way will not make up for the bad karma you sow by doing this.
4. Follow as many people as you’re allowed to on Twitter and flood the place with tweets about every tiny thing you can come up with all day long. Anyone dumb enough to follow you back will quickly realize their mistake.
5. Set up a fake “survey” site about what the best product is in your niche. Then, using a different IP address, write “reviews” rating your product the highest and containing links to your awesome site where you sell your awesome product.

You can’t get away from link building when it comes to getting traffic, moving upward in the SERP listings and increasing your PageRank. But don’t try to take the easy way out. The work you put in getting links legitimately will be well worth it over the long term, while ill-gotten links will sabotage your efforts very quickly.

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Ideally, building up great text links should be a long term process. You may have heard the joke about the American tourist in England asking how they get their lawns so beautiful. The Englishman answers, “It’s quite a straightforward process. Just plant it, cut it, roll it, and water it for 400 years.” Links tended to in a long term fashion will turn out to be valuable, but most webmasters don’t have the web equivalent of 400 years (which is probably about two years) to cultivate all those links.

Building text links from your website should be a tactical and a strategic process, and much will depend on your time and budget. Begin by thinking about sites that might like to link to yours, or that would be pleased to find a back link from your site. Here are a few suggestions:

• Blogs in your niche that you admire
• Government Sites
• Non-competing sites in your niche
• Media sites
• Related hobby sites
• University and college sites

You should also find out where your competitors link to and where they get their back links. This is easy to do with tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer. Simply go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and type a URL into the “Explore URL” box and you’ll get list of the sites that link to that URL. You can see an example from a vintage clothing site in the first screen shot. To get this, I put in the site’s URL, clicked on “Explore URL” and then clicked on “Inbound Links.” You can, in turn, explore each of those for inbound links if you want to.

Once you have that information, check up on the Google PageRank of those inbound links to identify good opportunities for getting links to and from those sites. If your browser (such as Chrome) does not support a Google Toolbar that has a PageRank button, you can install this book marklet by dragging it to your favorites toolbar. Then when you want to learn the PageRank of a site, go to the site you want to check, then click on the book marklet’s button in your favorites toolbar.

Contacting sites that link to your competitors is a part of building up some great text links, but their relevance is important too. You can also use the “Similar Pages” link (circled in the second screen shot) in your search results to find more sites for your link building strategy. The results of a click on “Similar Pages” can be seen in the third screen shot. The “Similar Pages” that keep showing up for your top keywords have a solid place in the niche’s neighborhood. You can consider linking to them too.

Keep in mind that stringing together a bunch of anchor text links with just enough content to sort of hold it together isn’t a good idea. Adding to your links should be a part of your overall content strategy. You can try every trick out there with regards to SEO, but if you don’t have decent content, you’re ride at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) if you get there at all will be brief.

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of unique content. If your site’s content can be found on a dozen other sites, you’re not going to get links. You’ll get the most mileage out of content that presents a new view of things or new data. Remember that link building is a constant process. It isn’t something you do one time and forget about. Put unique and relevant content first, and work the links in so that they make sense, and you’ll have a plan that works for the long haul.

Another part of your link building campaign is more related to the user experience when visiting your website. If every text link is anchored by the same keywords, they will quickly realize that your site is about SEO rather than content, and may choose to go elsewhere for more meaty content. Think of how you react when you go to a new website. The links with the biggest payoff to you as a user are the ones that are anchored with text that is meaningful, and where the links take to to even richer sources of information about the anchor text subject.

It can be a real waste of time to get to a site and follow link after link looking for information but never finding it. Don’t frustrate your readers like that. If you’ve anchored a link with the text “trolling motor installation” then you should follow through and actually provide the information with a click on the link.

Ideally (in the “Grow a Great Lawn in Just 400 Years” vein), you should be able to write your text as if the links weren’t even there, and then go back and add the links to the appropriate anchor text. Many sites do this, but they are often sites built out of passion for a subject than sites that are supposed to earn money. But the natural anchor text approach is still a good one. In fact, search engines are becoming suspicious of pages full of links that are all anchored to the same keyword phrase. It doesn’t mean that keywords don’t matter. It just means that keyword stuffing can hurt rather than help your site.

The same is true of links that consist solely of “click here.” If your page is sprinkled with “click here” links, all of which take visitors to a different place, they’re going to have a hard time remembering exactly which “click here” link they chose should they want to retrace their steps. Another frustrating user experience is clicking on a vague link and suddenly being confronted with a massive automatic download. It’s only polite to give your readers a brief hint of what they’re in for, like “opens new window,” or “download PDF document.”

Bottom line: keep anchor text meaningful, natural, not keyword-stuffed, and relevant, and over time you’ll build up the kind of internet cred that will keep you at the top of the SERPs.

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This post assumes that you know what Twitter is (a place where you can post 140-character microblog posts) and how to get an account (Just go to Twitter.com and it will tell you how). Twitter is becoming a more important in the world of SEO because now Google is showing “real time” search results from there, as you can see in the screen shot. When you see Twitter results in a Google results page, they update in real time. However, there is a “pause” link at the top of the Twitter results so you can freeze them long enough to get a better look.

You can use Twitter to let others know what is going on with your website, including promotions, deals, and relevant site updates. You can update Twitter from web-enabled cell phones, iPhones, Blackberrys, and other mobile internet devices. On Twitter, you’ll want to “follow” other Twitterers who are interested in what your website’s all about. It is easy to find those people. You simply put your search terms in Twitter’s search box on your Twitter home page and you’ll get current, real-time tweets on that topic. For example, a search on “vintage clothing” brought up a long list of tweets, some of which are shown in the second screen shot. Those might be good people to follow if your website sells vintage clothing.

When you choose to follow someone on Twitter, they will be apprised of it and will have the opportunity to follow you with one click. If your Twitter profile makes you look like a spammer, they probably won’t follow you back. But if your profile shows that you have something real to say and a website they might like, then you have a good chance of them following you back. The following process builds on itself as others look for people to follow on topics that interest them.

10 tips to help you get the most out of the off-page SEO juice you can get from Twitter.

1. Put a link on your website saying that you’re on Twitter and they can follow you there. Twitter has all kinds of widgets you can easily add to your site.
2. The bio field on your Twitter profile, which is 160 characters long, should really count. Include your site’s top keywords. Because your bio is indexed, the contents are what give your Twitter tweets their relevance. Your Twitter bio is your meta description, so you may want to use a professional description or talk about yourself in the third person. Don’t blow it talking about how you love stuffed-crust pizza.
3. Consider integrating your Twitter URL in your website’s Global Footer, which shows up at the bottom of every page of your site. This can help boost your Twitter URL in search engines.
4. Include your website’s URL in your Twitter profile. While this link doesn’t give you any “link juice” (since these are so-called No Follow links), they do give people an easy way to get to your website.
5. The first 40 or so characters form part of the title tag for your tweet. The title tag will also include your account name. The full tweet is indexed by the search engines. Therefore, make those first 42 characters count by jumping right into the subject with keywords.
6. If you can, start your tweet with one of your prime keyword phrases to give a theme to each message. But don’t simply fill your tweet with keywords to the point that it becomes nonsense. Your Twitter title tag consists of <Actual Name> (Username) on Twitter.
7. Your Twitter title tag consists of <Actual Name> (Username) on Twitter, so try to optimize it. The thing you want to rank for should be the thing inside the <Actual Name> part. You may have to do some thinking to come up with an actual name to go on your Twitter account. Don’t change your user name, just your “Name” in your Twitter account settings.
8. Make your tweets re-tweetable by keeping them shorter than 120 characters whenever possible. This will also depend on the length of your Twitter name, since “RT @yourTwittername” is affixed to the beginning of anything of yours that is re-tweeted.
9. Twitter internally links followers to your profile. Followers with higher PageRank squeeze a little bit of link juice on you. You’ll pick up outside links if you consistently tweet good content. But at 140 characters, it has to be “SEO concentrate.”
10. Every once in awhile put in a link to your Twitter profile on your website. Can’t hurt.

And for good measure, here are 5 things that will turn people off to following you on Twitter.

1. You don’t have an avatar. People want to put a face with the Twitterer they follow. A simple head shot is fine.
2. You follow 50 times more people than follow you and you don’t ever update.
3. Your updates are only ever used to push your products and services.
4. Your return follow message is obviously mass-produced to pitch your products and services, like “Thanks! How can I help you get the trim thighs you’ve always wanted?”
5. You never engage those who follow you on Twitter, and therefore risk being perceived as thinking you’re “too good” for your followers or that you only have your Twitter account to push your e-commerce website.

Twitter is just like any other social media tool when it comes to boosting your website’s SERP ranking. Don’t spam, make your posts relevant, and provide links in some, but not all Tweets. Don’t abuse the system, and you’ll gain followers steadily.

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