OK, so after my last rank about the SEO spammy company, let’s now go back to basics…
One of the most common questions that novice SEOs ask is the question.

What is the main purpose of link building for your site?

There are two things to consider when you are doing link building.

1. Links for targeted traffic
2. Links for SEO

Sometimes this will overlap, but for the most part your link building campaign will focus on these two main linking opportunities.

Link Building For Targeted Traffic

Forum links, nofollow links on high traffic sites, links on question/answer sites, all of these kinds of links will send a good amount of targeted traffic.

Even though those links may not be hugely beneficial for your SEO link building campaign, they can send highly targeted traffic to your site, and isn’t that the ultimate goal? Your link building campaign should not dismiss links for targeted traffic.

Link Building For SEO

But I am sure ranking on the first page of Google and increasing your search engine traffic is your primary objective, so I would like to focus more on link building for SEO.

GAB’S TIP: Look At the Bigger Picture When Building Links for SEO

In order to get good rankings you need to seek out links with SEO in mind. Above I have stated the attributes of a quality link for SEO purposes, now its time to start getting them!

By thinking about the bigger picture when getting links, you know exactly what you are trying to achieve and the direction you are heading.

When you are getting links for SEO to help with your site’s rankings, consider these four factors: PR, anchor text benefits, link diversity (authority), and the number of external links on the page.

They all have varying levels of importance, but your ultimate goal is to get links on a diverse number of domains, on high PR pages, with your desired anchor text. Without a doubt getting your desired anchor text in the link is crucial to your success.

Deep Linking – The Most Important Aspect of Link Building

As a general rule of thumb I would suggest getting 70/30% of links to the homepage/inner pages. Although want the many backlinks pointing to the homepage since you are targeting important money keywords on this page, you also want to make sure you are building deep links to other pages.

While a good navigation and site structure will allow flow link juice from the homepage to other important inner pages of your site to help with rankings, you also want to build links to those pages to improve your rankings.

Backlinks on external sites are more important then links from your own website, hence they will benefit your rankings more.

Making Anchor Text Look Natural (This is a Ninja Science)

In addition to getting deep links to other important pages on your site, you also want to make the anchor text you’re using for link text to look appear natural by varying up the anchor text as well.

To illustrate my point using an example, if you were targeting the keyword “flights to Melbourne” on the homepage, get other links with the anchor text “cheap flights to Melbourne”, “flights to Melbourne Australia” etc.

Basically you want to include the core keyword you want to rank for, but vary up the anchor text with additional words that also get searched often so you’re not always using the same anchor text.

You can use different variations of the keyword including google synonyms when varying up the anchor text, and you can also use links such as “domain.com”, “click here” or simply link directly to the URL to make your link building campaign more natural. But for the most part, especially for better quality links, you want to use your desired anchor text. This cannot be overstated enough.

We all know that about 90% of SEO is link building. The on-site stuff is just too easy to master, especially with all of the WordPress plugins and SEO guides out there these days.
What really separates the movers and shakers from the haters is link building. If you know how to build high quality backlinks that Google loves, your site is going to take off like a bat out of hell.

So what is necessary to become a solid link builder? I mean someone that can get the results they (or their clients) need to make serious $$$.
Here are a few of the most important traits to build/look for:

• Creativity
• Techie-ness
• Sociable/Likeable
• Analytical
• Hustle

Let’s take a look at each of these. I’ll prove to you that if you can master these traits, you’ve got link building in the bag!

Creativity
Most people aren’t creative- especially internet marketers.

Instead of thinking for themselves and designing a new way to do something, they would much rather just follow a system that’s already proven.

While this can usually lead to good results- good isn’t great.

Probably the most important thing a link builder can learn is how to be creative. How to really think outside the box, and not just stay within the norm.

Let’s face it- Google isn’t dumb, or static. It’s constantly evolving, changing the way algorithms pick top rankings for a keyword.
That means that there are always new losers or winners emerging. What used to work may not work anymore, and vice versa.
I can almost guarantee you that they winners are going to be those link builders with a little creativity.
For example, it’ll be the guys who got a ton of guest blog posts from authority blogs.

You’ll find more winners who found a way to sneak a link from major authority sites like ehow, Amazon, Wikipedia or news sites.
In other words- it was the guys who were creative in finding extremely powerful links that are going to come out ton top. Always.

Techie-Ness
Okay I know that isn’t a real word- sue me. You understand what I’m saying- the guys who know coding and technology will always have a leg up on those that don’t.

I know there’s a never-ending debate on whether profile links still work, but let’s say for a second that they do. The more profile links you get, the better you rank, right?
Well if you’re doing all of these links by hand, you might get like 100 a day, right.
Or you can do an custom software blast and get a few thousand at once.
Or perhaps you fire up indexing script and get the few thousands indexed in no time.
Then Link builder X fires up his own personal X script destroyer and blasts 100K links to his second layer of links….

Who do you think is going to win?

Again this is just an example, but hopefully you see the point. On the internet, knowing software and technology can lead to an amazing advantage.
Besides just backlinks, this also pertains to security, tracking, spying on competition- you name it.
Now, you don’t necessarily have to become a master coder to master link building, but it can put you a bitahead of your “competition”.

Sociable/Likeable

Do people like you? Are you warm and approachable, and people just think you’re a cool SEO Ninja?
If so, you can open up doors that the losers with no social skills never will be able to.
Those doors are called relationships.
We all know that joint ventures are one of the keys to successful business. JVs can be done in any industry, both between competitors and non-competing businesses.
If you know how to build relationships with the owners of authority sites or blogs, or maybe just with the developer of some hot link building software- you’ll be in a very sweet place.
Remember that relationships aren’t just about what someone can offer you. In fact, you should never start a relationship with “hey, can you do this for me?”
Instead, remember that it’s a person that you’re talking to- build a relationship with them, maybe do them a favor- then reap the rewards.

Analytical
Are you analytical? Can you look at how something is being done, or how someone is doing something, then figure out why?
Not only can you figure out why it’s being done that way, but also why it works? (if it does)
Going back to the creativity thing- most marketers aren’t going to really analyze the competition. They may fire up Market Samurai or something and that’s great- but you can definitely do more.
For example you can check out the competition’s website itself. What kind of content do they have? How many pages? Are they using WordPress or another type of script?
Link building and SEO has some fierce competition. Although there are definitely keywords you can rank for without too much analysis, for the big money keywords you should definitely dissect your competition’s link strategy.

This means not just looking at how many links they have, but also what types of links they have.
In a few words: Use your brain baby!

Hustle

This may seem obvious- but you have to hustle.
Get a fire under your tail- or get rocked by the competition.
Going back to the profile link example, let’s say you’re in a link building race with your competition.
If you don’t hustle, for every 1000 links you put up your might competition might throw up 2000 or more.
Or let’s say you’re commenting on authority blogs. If you aren’t hustling, your competition may get up 3-4 comments for every 1-2 that you do.
It’s not just about working long hours, either. It’s about getting the most out of your time.
For example, blog commenting. You (or your team of course) should always be looking at if you can increase how many quality comments you leave per hour. If last week it was about 20 per hour, this week try to make it 25.

Work long- work fast- work smart. That’s hustling!

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it, folks. Although I think Creativity is probably the most important thing for a link builder, if you can master these other qualities too then you will dominate the link building game and then one day if you are lucky you can work for me

So I’m back from my first family – trip to the snow… I had a great, fantastic time, so much fun (I even learned to ski!) So overall a very nice mini winter holiday. If you have never in a snow holiday, you have to give it a go: The kids absolutely love it So while I was away, my site got hacked… (yep this site got hacked, go figure) and I managed to write this quick post about more tips about link building.

As many of you now… (off course you do!) link building is a very important task to do if you are trying to get your website to rank in the search engines. There are a lot of different factors that come into play in terms of how well a website ranks in the search engines and backlinks is one of the most important factors. Backlinks are the links that are pointing back to a website. In order to help improve search engine rankings and ultimately get more traffic to a website, link building is utilized. Link building is basically the process in which one builds backlinks to their site. Here are five powerful tips that can help maximize the effectiveness of link building.

One of the most important link building tips is consistency. When building backlinks, it is important to take a consistent approach. This means that if you build backlinks one month, you should continue to build backlinks the next month especially if you have not accomplished your goals in terms of search engine ranking and traffic. This also pertains to the amount of backlinks you build. If you build 100 backlinks to your site one month, you should try to build around the same amount of backlinks the next month. You don’t want your link building to look unnatural.

Another important link building tip is to make sure you are building high quality backlinks to your site. These types of links would give your site the biggest benefits. If your link was found on a website that was relevant to your website, had a high page rank, and was dofollow, the search engine spiders would most likely see that link as a high quality backlink. The more links you have like that, the better chances your website has of improving in the search engines especially if you are using anchor text with the keyword phrase you are trying to rank for.

Along with making sure you are building high quality backlinks, you should also try to build links from different sources. For example, if you are just building backlinks from forums alone, you are limiting your link building effectiveness. It is best to build links from as many different sources as you can. There are many ways to build backlinks such as writing articles, posting in forums, submitting press releases, blog commenting and so on. You would want to take advantage of as many link building methods as you can to maximize your link building effectiveness. Just make sure to avoid getting backlinks from bad neighborhoods such as link farms for example.

Analyzing your competitors backlinks is another powerful link building tip. A lot of people are not aware of the information that they can gather from their competitors backlinks. This information can help someone’s link building campaign a great deal. If you are trying to reach the top of the search engines for a keyword phrase and have yet to do so, you can examine where your competitors are getting their backlinks and what type of backlinks they have pointing back to their website that is helping them rank for that specific keyword phrase. This way you know what type of links are helping your competitors rank so well. By knowing this information, you can build the same type of links as well as obtain some of the backlinks your competitor has.

The final link building tip is simply patience. Patience is very important when it comes to link building. It takes time for search engine spiders to find these links your are building back to your website. It also takes time for the search engines to determine where your site should rank after finding these links. In some cases, the results of link building may take a while to show. That is why it is very important to be patient and maintain your link building efforts until you see your link building efforts pay off especially if you are very serious about increasing your search engine rankings for your website.

Link building can be a tedious process but the ending results can be very rewarding (you know what I mean $$$$?). These link building tips can help you build backlinks that can really improve your search engine rankings, which in most cases, can increase the traffic to your website especially if you reach the top of the search engines for a keyword phrase that gets a decent amount of traffic.

You want fast link building? Me too.. in the same way I want a Ferrari… a boat… a jetski…  and being adopted by Angelina Jolie.

Ok boys and girls… welcome to Link Building 101… today let’s walk about quick, easy and nice ideas to get backlinks

If you don’t know it by now… (helllooo!!!) building backlinks to your website is essential if you want to improve search engine rankings and get traffic. Although the actual process of getting these backlinks can be quite a task (boring), there are plenty of ways to get them. The following are seven popular ways to build backlinks to your site.

1. Forum Signatures - Most forums will allow members to leave a few lines of text in their signature. This space can also be used to add a link depending on which forum it is. If you participate on a forum, you can leave a link in the signature area that points back to your site. In most cases you can set it up to be an anchored text link meaning that you can use your keyword phrase or whatever text you want to use as your website url title. Each time you would make a post including your signature, you would have a link pointing back to your website. Now keep in mind – if your site is a PET FOOD joining a forum about Iphones… well… you get my point ~ don’t u?

2. Forum Profiles - This way of building backlinks is also becoming more and more popular. The way it works is by finding a forum that has quite a high page rank and registering and filling out the profile information. In most cases, these forums will have a place where you can insert your website url which would be publicly viewable and clickable on your public profile. Sometimes, there are also other sections where you can include your website url or even anchor text links such as in the “bio” section. Search engine spiders crawl forums all the time and this is why this is a great way to build backlinks. This is OK to do… if you understand that the proper way to do this is to be an active part of the forum. give back to the forum what you are getting from it. Don’t just register for a link… be more original than that.

3. High Page Rank Profiles – This approach to building backlinks is quite similar to forum profiles. It is basically taking advantage of the opportunity to leave a link back to your website on high page rank websites through profiles. Some of these authority high page rank websites allow members to include information on their profiles about themselves and other types of information including their website. Their may even be features such as having their own blog which they could use towards link building.
Want to know what sites you can find links from ? mmm join my SEO Training course to find out more .

4. Blog Commenting – Blog commenting has been a popular link building method for a while now and continues to be a great way to build backlinks to a website. The idea is to find blogs that you can comment on. Most of these blogs will allow you to leave your name and website url. When your comment goes live, you will have a link pointing back to your website. The search engine spiders love blogs so if you want to build some backlinks that can be found pretty quickly, blog commenting is a great way to do it.

5. Articles – Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is another great way to build backlinks. When you submit articles to these directories, you are allowed to include your url to your website in the author resource area and sometimes you can even include a link within the article itself. Once the article is published, you will have a link or multiple links pointing back to your site. The more articles you have published, the more backlinks you will have. Although this “sound” simple… proper article marketing is an art. (believe me) . Balancing the time spent writing articles and the amount of links you may obtain from each site is difficult to balanace.

6. Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking sites are websites that allow users to save their favorite links which they can share among other members of the website. If you bookmark your website or articles using social bookmarking sites, you will also be gaining backlinks. Bookmarks from social bookmarking sites are picked up by the search engines a lot and do count as backlinks. Now… obviously Google is not stupid, so don’t push it… use social bookmarking in a smart way. Change the way you bookmark your pages… or may be original and try to bookmark the articles pointing to your site? (just an idea…)

7. Web 2.0 Websites - Web 2.0 websites represents a large portion of sites including social bookmarking sites. These types of sites are great for building backlinks. Hubpages, Squidoo, Wetpaint, Blogger, and Weebly are all web 2.0 sites that you can use to build backlinks to your website. You can share your content while also leaving a link back your site. Web 2.0 websites range from social networking sites to video sharing sites. Making the most of these sites and finding a way to leave a link back to your site can really help your link building campaigns. Personally I hate squidoo… (sorry Seth Godin!) and I love hubpages…  it all depends of what you like the most…  what is hot today will loose “juicy” next year, so you need to keep trying new system and web 2.0 sites.

These are some of the just some basic ways to build backlinks. Just by using a few of these methods on a regular basis, you could increase the number of backlinks pointing to your site greatly. If you use them strategically, you could also get a nice sum of traffic while at the same time gain quality backlinks.

Remember: There is no magic bullet here… so build… build and build…. until you want to stop. Then, once you stop: Start again.

Want to get more backlinks…. let me plug the following product below:

Today, I’m taking care of Dominic my 10 month old son.. and while he sleeps I decided to do some link analysis of some sites in Australia in the Acne niche (working for one of my customers). While doing my research I discovered something interesting.

I found a very nice site called “Ashley Centre” . Ashley Centre has a BIG marketing company called: Well, please visit the site and check the link in the footer. This big Marketing company is for sure is a BIG FISH in the SEO/Marketing/PPC company… one of that companies that you consider a “real company” (not like me lol ) .
In their website, in their case study claim that they have worked with Ashley Centre for over 6 years… and when you visit this marketing agency website , you think… “gosh this guys know what they are doing” .

That’s why when I did the link analysis I was expecting to find solid links… serious links from web 2 sites, from authority sites, etc.

But, oh boy I was wrong: What I found was WordPress Spam… oh yeah… not the kind of of WordPress Spam that says “hey nice blog, good article bro!”… but instead the one that says

“Acne Treatment: For Acne Treatment, Acne Tests, Acne diagnosis, Acne Symptoms & Natural Acne Treatments Melbourne Australia; contact The Ashley Centre in Melbourne. ”

Obviously the wordpress post they posted HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ACNE… and they where taking clear advantage of the fact that the post was auto-approved. Mmm the true nature of the real blog spammer!

So my reaction? Well, I decided to contact them… because, they are a SERIOUS company, charging SERIOUS bucks.. they can’t just be spamming like any Nigerian Spammer spams my wordpress blogs every single day…

So this was my email:
—————————————————-

Hi Guys

Gabriel here, from NSW…. I was looking at your site and I noticed you work with

“The Ashley Centre”

I noticed this mainly because I have found some wordpress-blog spam aiming to target the keyword Acne Treatment .

Examples:

http://blogs.lvc.edu/green/post/Sustainable-Dining.aspx

and

http://www.kyleheon.com/articles/2009/09/18/xml-caching-in-asp-net-can-be-dangerous-to-your-health

In fact I found many other examples.

I’m curious if this is part of Alkemi Link building strategy? WordPress blog spam… ? Your comments have no relation with the posts and clearly they are spam.

Can you please clarify this for me?

Thanks guys!

—————————————————-

The good thing is that I got a reply pretty fast and here it is:

Hi Gabriel,

I appreciate you bringing this to my attention….

(Based on the legal disclaimer I can’t add anything more)

But overall they say… hey Gabriel, thanks for letting me know… OMG I had no idea…

* Yeah Right !

—————————————————-

So my conclusion: Mmm … it seems regardless how BIG the company is and how important THEIR CUSTOMERS are… many SEO companies in Australia seem to have very little idea about how to provide value link building.

I know what you are thinking: “Hey, but they can prove to you they can rank a site in 1st position.

Yes.. you are right… but by spamming wordpress blogs, they just leave a trail of easy links for any competitor to find, match and follow…

is that all there is?

Is that the REAL marketing strategy of a Top SEO company?

So what do you need to learn from this is:

1. If you are an SEO expert… don’t be a lazy b*st*rd and do your job properly. Don’t go out there and spam wordpress posts about Sarah Palin when your clients website has to do with Liposuction Services. Be smart, do a proper effort, build web 2 sites, post good articles, send links to that articles, increase the PR of your own web 2 pages, get your PR featured in a serious authority site…  and avoid leaving a trail of auto-approval blogs .

2. If you are a company looking to hire a “BIG marketing company” well do your homework… just because they have an CEO and a cool fancy office in Sydney CBD, it doesn’t mean they have any clear clue about Link Building or SEO…

* Update: I just check on this “Marketing Agency” website and they also do link building for Optus Business Solutions… and guess what? Yep… more WordPress Spam..  LOL this guys are simply amazing!

Getting back links from authoritative websites will boost your search engine ranking in the long term. Spamming the forum and blog with your links is very cheap but those links are not authoritative. Authoritative links worth much more than these blog spam links. Authoritative links can be obtained from government sites and education sites. The authority of the website depends on its age and content. Domain name with .gov and .edu extensions usually have professional content written by expert and people will put their trust in them and link to them. Consequently, people will link to these sites. Any website can be authoritative.

Lots of webmasters want their websites to be authoritative so they can rank in the search engines and have many visitors to their website. To make your website authoritative, you have to get relevant authoritative websites to link to you. You will not get authoritative sites to exchange link with you wif your website does not has any useful and valuable content.

If you want to beat your competitors, you should do some research to see what authoritative sites are linking to them. Find the websites that are link to them and has the highest page rank. Once you know which authoritative websites are linking to them, you should devise a content strategy so that they will be interested in you. Make sure the content of your website is relevant, non commercial and good quality so that your website will be an attractive page to link to.

A campaign to get a link from authoritative site can take a few months. You must be prepared to build a relationship with these authoritative sites in order to get them link back to you. You should not just request for a link in your first email to these authoritative site. The authoritative sites will never link to you with the purpose of helping you to make money. They will only link to you if your site has content that is useful to their website audience because their primary concern is their users.

Do research on their needs. Figure out how you can meet their needs. A way to do this is to review the things written by them in the past which expressed a need, for example, “Our website needs a resource to …” When you find out their need, do whatever you can to address and fill their need.

The Importance of Outbound Links

Everyone is paying attention to how inbound links can improve their website ranking. Webmasters often focus too much on inbound links and neglected the importance of outbound links. Outbound link is a URL is a link to an external site from a site. Outbound links let the search engines sees what the webmaster of the website values most.

You don’t want outbound links if your website is selling a product or service as these outbound links will be an exit loop hole and may drive your customers to their website instead. However, if your website sells affiliate products, you should have outbound links as they will help you to make money. A blog is a different compare to a static website. You can write the latest information in your blog and link to relevant websites and it will appear at the top. You want your readers to participate in your blog through blog comment, trackbacks, and et cetera. Therefore, a blog is a good place for outbound link.

Outbound links can boost your search engine ranking and gives your website many benefits if you do it correctly. Outbound links let your readers know that you are authoritative site because you are willing to link to quality website with useful information. Outbound links automatically ping back a trackback to the linked site and deliver traffic to your blog. Search engines bots and your readers will look at the relevant outbound links of your website to authoritative websites before they will attribute your website with respect and authority. The reputation of your blog will increase within your industry, potential customers and current customers if you always link to authoritative sites for their useful information.

If your blog only link to pages within your sites with relevant anchor text, it will hurt your SEO ranking in the long term. Google will see your blog as a spam and therefore your trust rank will decrease as well as search rank. However, if you regularly link out to quality authoritative sites relevant to your niche, you will get a boost in SEO ranking and the page rank of your blog will increase and not decrease.

Although outbound links is only a small measure to the authority of a website, they plays a vital role. A blog is social and if it only link internally, it does not provide social proof and will likely to have little authoritative value. Therefore, outbound link is an important part when you are trying to improve your SEO ranking.

Organic Links vs. Paid Links

Google had been spoken a lot about their policy in paid links and have taken action on it. Although Yahoo and MSN also indicate that they don’t want webmasters to buy links in order to improve search engine rankings, they did not act on that policy yet.

Buying text links to increase your website’s search engine ranking and PageRank are against their guidelines. Furthermore, Google even provides a form where users can report paid link to Google. If a paid link is not relevant to your website and not useful to users, the search engines are unlikely to give it value. The algorithm of search engine is programmed to detect the value of links to users. Paid links are is not as valuable as organic links. However, if the paid links provides value to users, the search engines will capture the value from that link whether it is paid or unpaid link. Google uses algorithm and human to detect paid links.

A common point in both Google and Yahoo policies is that paid link will impact the rankings of the website. To execute against paid link, Google had suggests that paid text links should be marked with nofollow attribute. Yahoo is different with Google. Yahoo focus more on the value of the link to the end user whether it is paid or unpaid link. The value of a link is measured by the relevancy of the link to the website.

You should not depend on paid links for your search engine ranking. Organic link building is more recognized by the search engines and it’s free. Paid linking is part of link building and should be considered in your online link building campaign. Search engines like Google and Yahoo loves organic link because they count it as a vote for your site. To attract organic links, you should have good quality content that will make people want to link to your website. To create a link worthy content, you must think about what sort of content you would link to. By writing a post that is useful and interesting to your readers, people will also want to share it by linking to your site.

Instead of writing original content, you can also create a useful list of other’s people website, for example a free list of dofollow blogs. Linking to other blogs will also help you to get backlinks. Every bloggers love to see their stats and see what websites are linking to them. They will sure to check your website out and if your content is quality, he probably will give you a backlink on his blog.

How to Find Target Long Tail Keywords

Higher search engine traffic will brings many benefits to your website whether it is online retailers and affiliate marketers, this means more money can be make with increasing sales and commissions. More traffic increase to a blog will increase the blog audience and this could mean more profit from advertisement published on the blog.

To obtain consistent traffic from the search engine, you should use long tail keywords to obtain search engine traffic. Most of the time, visitors arrived at your website using low volume long tail keywords search queries instead of the major keywords. These long tail keywords focus on a specific topic and received lower volumes of search engine queries and less competition. Using long tail keyword will help your website to rank easier on the search engine and increase the overall traffic from organic search to your website.

Long tail keywords will help your website to have higher conversion rate. Visitors usually query using long tail keyword for a specific product and therefore they will be more likely to purchase your product when they arrive at your website. Long tail keywords allows you to efficiently target potential customers. It is easier to rank for long tail keywords because it has little competition. Targeting long tail keywords will gradually help your website to rank well in search engines as more pages get indexed. This increased the visibility and popularity of a website. Search engine visitors are targeted traffic because they are searching for specific information on your website and will likely to click on your ads or subscribe to your newsletter and blog RSS. This will help your website to have greater audience and increase the monetization potential for your website in the long term.

You can use online keyword research tool to find long tail keyword for example, Google Adwords Keyword suggestion tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and Overture Keyword tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). These keyword tools provide variations of secondary keyword from the primary keyword you type in the search box. They also let you know the search volume of every keyword. When you found your keyword, you simply query Google with the keyword and see how many results return. The lesser the results return, the lesser the competition for the keyword and the better it will be. If you have a website or blog, you should try these tips on long tail keywords and you will see that the increased traffic you will receive from the search engines.