The new word for linkbuilding is content distribution or content marketing.  Social media sharing, guest blogging, file sharing, RSS feed, etc community or network sites have been popping up to take over the role of what was previously considered link farms.  These are essentially the same strategy as link farms, where people join the network and share each others’ content.  Except, instead of just providing outright anchor text links, like this “home sauna health benefits“, the idea is to be more vague about what you are gaining in search results and encourage a diverse sharing that builds more diverse backlink profiles and social signals for the participating members. The issue in the past was if the network was not diverse enough and had the same members linking to each other, your backlink profile grew, but had limited diversity.  Now that link farms are actively being penalized, the more incestuous networks are the easiest for Google to identify, making these not just a questionable benefit, but high risk.

Review of Content Distribution & Marketing Communities

This is a growing list of content distribution networks that I am trying out, so that I can give you my honest opinion and review.  Please feel free to leave comments on your own suggestions and reviews of content marketing websites.

Viral Buzz Content

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I like this service because it is free and it encourages people to become active in a particular category so they can share their own content, browse other people’s content and share it.  With the simplicity of being a aggregate of content in your preferred categories, with social sharing enabled, the concept is solid.  To ensure high quality, your social channels (essentially Facebook and Twitter accounts) where you intend to share content are checked by the system to ensure they are high quality accounts that engage with a good size crowd.  My own personal Facebook and Twitter accounts actually did not make the grade.  I was somewhat shocked that I was not allowed to share content on my personal Facebook account.  I may consider myself a thought leader (LOL), though I don’t have a large following in my personal Facebook account populated mainly with personal friends.  Nonetheless, I am giving this network a try and have already posted this Google Plus SEO article in their member sharing section.

Join Viral Content Now!

My Blog Guest

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This guest blogging network is similar to the Viral Buzz Content concept above, though a bit more advanced in that people are not just sharing published content, but unpublished, unique content that has not yet been seen.  Sort of like an elance bidding platform, website owners and writers are connected.  The terms of use for content is based on preferences of the writer and publisher.

Blog Engage

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RSS feed syndication service that is paid, ranging from $9.99 per month to $99.99 per month.  The syndication lives on about 5 domains, ranging from PageRank 2-4.  Not very impressive for the homepage of a feed syndication.  The promotions I’ve read, try to sell you on the link building value of receiving high quantity links from 3 websites.  Sorry, but I’m not impressed.  I will not bother participating in this paid RSS syndication service.

Technorati

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Essential RSS syndication.  Enough said.

Blog Catalog

Thumbs Medium :/
RSS syndication website that used to give do follow links to all members, then restricted it to a paid option, but now that it has gained enough traction, it relies solely on providing you visibility to its audience. I’m not totally convinced on the effectiveness of their reach, but its a free option worth the time to set it up.

Atlanta Bloggers

Thumbs up Great example of an individually managed RSS aggregator website in a niche area.  Anyone can submit their website blog RSS feed, but each is personally reviewed by the site owner for quality and relevance.  Those that are approved receive a followed links from the homepage using the RSS feed to populate the title of the most recent 10 posts.

The post Content Distribution & Content Marketing Communities: the evolved link farm? appeared first on Blend SEO.

The challenge in link building is to find a good mix of easy to manage and long term effectiveness.  When I started SEO in 2004, the best links were the hardest ones to get.  It’s still true. Even in 2010 we knew best practices in link building was to go social, make real relationships and  build link-worthy content.  In 2011 and 2012, the online world got a slap in the face as Google actually began to enforce link building best practices via Panda and Penguin along with ranking penalties and webmaster tools messages about unnatural link profiles. By 2013, I expect there will be a general acceptance of the idea of creating an environment that will attract links without asking for them.  This of course, starting from zero, will take a long time and is not a doable solution for many businesses that must justify an SEO budget.  But how can you measure and claim the value provided without counting links you actually created one-by-one?

Guest Blog Link Building

Many older link building tactics are still worthwhile in building a natural back link profile.  These tactics can be performed in an accountable way where link building efforts can be directly associated to the resulting links.  A great example of this is the guest blog.  The guest blog is an ideal means of creating links.  It is a win-win solution.  You provide content for a website.  Your link is only published if the website owner feels the content is valuable and appropriate.  Not only does it eliminate the possibility of spam, you can build a mutual relationship through the exchange.

How to Submit a Guest Blog That Gets Published

The following is actual guest blog content submitted to my SEO blog.  This is a great example of how to make contact and provide content that gets published. Initial contact was made by Paul via my website contact form.  He said he wanted to submit a guest blog.  I’ve received requests for guest blogs in the past, however his was on topic, so I was interested.  He provided his website in the initial contact and was up front about working for a link building service.  He provided three blog titles, all of which sounded like good posts for my SEO blog.  Here is the actual contact form message he left me (last name & email omitted for privacy).

Example Guest Blog Content

I checked out his website, read through the services and gained an idea for the attitude and mindset of the services.  Everything looked on the up and up.  I responded to Paul’s email, saying the titles looked good, send me a post to see if I like it.  He sent the following post.  I agree with the following link building methods as being good for 2012 and pretty safe as a future proof solution, assuming you keep a good balance and go easy on article distribution (some people say avoid it altogether).  I let Paul know I’d like to write an intro for the post, which you have read up to this point.  So here is the post content Paul sent me.

5 Link Building Methods for 2012

While you may have heard the mantra “content is king” being repeated more often than usual in 2012, effective link building is still absolutely imperative when it comes to a successful internet marketing campaign. While fresh and interesting content is also extremely important, Google’s algorithm is still based primarily on links and thus link building is likely to be around for a long time to come. To help you sort through the cacophony of link building techniques out there (many of which will actually hurt you in the long run!), here are five excellent link building methods for 2012.

Vary your Anchor Text

Some of Google’s recent updates have heavily penalized sites who used the exact same anchor text during their link building campaigns. While this used to actually offer sites more of a boost, practicing this technique will get your website a one ticket to Google’s sandbox. Vary your anchor text by incorporating your keyword in various formats. For example, if your keyword is “tennis shoes”, use anchor text such as “best tennis shoes”, “tennis shoes for sale” etc. This will make your links look natural to Google’s bots.

Guest Blog

Guest blogging is currently one of the most effective link building techniques in 2012. Internet marketers are seeing excellent results by posting high-quality blog posts on relevant blogs within their niche. Don’t just post on every blog you can find; you will see much better results by finding blogs relative to your keyword, with a decent PR and good traffic.

Blog Commenting

Continuing with the trend of blog interaction, leaving value-added comments on relevant blogs is also an excellent link building method for 2012. Don’t leave spammy comments that are obviously there solely for a link; leaving high-quality comments will help you in the long run by not only earning the trust of the blog owner, but of the readers of your comment that will likely end up on your website after reading your comment. That said, be sure to include a link to your website in a non-invasive, natural looking way.

Utilize Social Media

Google has just recently been putting a high priority on what are known as “social signals”, or essentially a strong presence on the various social networks. Be sure that your website has an active Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and any other social media account that you can frequently add content to.

Article Publishing

A method that has been around for a while and still has excellent potential for search engine rankings, article writing is a great way to get a plethora of contextual and targeted backlinks. Make sure to vary your article at least a little bit between article directories, as submitting the exact same one can hurt you in the long run.

There you have it folks, five link building methods for 2012 that are sure to give you a boost in the search engine rankings. Now get out there and start building some links!

The post 5 Link Building Methods for 2012: Successful Guest Blogging appeared first on Blend SEO.

Search Engine Land’s Eric Enge and Greg Lee, Blend SEO at SEMPO Atlanta Linkbuilding Event

I met Eric Enge author for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch at SEMPO Atlanta Presents Post Panda/Penguin Link Building.  The SEO presenters at this SEMPO Atlanta event revealed link building tactics and strategies they use and best practices moving forward.  Audience questions answered by the panel followed. My notes from the event, as well as Q&A are below.

Today’s Link Building Tactics:

Content Marketing and Relationship Building (Social Networking)

Overview: Erin Everhart from 352 Media opened up with her process of using social networks to build relationships with link providers.  Loren Baker from Blue Glass Interactive spoke next on the evolution of SEO link building from link exchange and directories to present content marketing. Eric Enge spoke last, revealing his success in the SEO industry via the same networking used to build links and traffic.

Here are my notes from the event…
(Disclaimer: Q&A and all other indications of what people said are paraphrased)

SEMPO Atlanta Presents Post Panda/Penguin Link Building

Erin Everhart

SEMPO Atlanta Post Panda/Penguin Link Building Panel

Search for people, not websites.  Find the influencer and establish a relationship. 1, 2, 3 step on opening up the relationship.  Follow on Twitter, Tweet a question about something they wrote. [At this point, hearing some familiar stuff, I got distracted by Cory Jaccino, sitting next to me who was sharing a few of his own linkbuilding ideas. Cory says – cross reference your contacts with a friend and use a tag team approach.  Introduce your contacts/friends to your partner who needs a link and he does the same.  Then I thought, why not expand it out.  Sounds like it could become a linkbuilding software or opt-in paid linkbuilding network – sounds spammy – ohhhh no.  But seriously, if its just based on networking among people, its not really a link farm and wouldn’t get flagged unless you overused it.  Anyway back to the presenter….] Reach out via facebook or Linkedin.  Email is not recommended, but at least use their name in the subject, keep it short.  Follow up afterward.

Loren Baker

Basic explanation of Penguin & Panda crack down on links from thin content.  Social mentions of your brand provides social proof around your brand.  Good links come from sites with

• Rich content
• High social engagement
• Large audiences

Evaluating Link Targets
Old link evaluation metrics are less important.

• Think audience potential over age
• If the link cant send you traffic, you probably don’t want it
• Is the site a hub?  Do people rely on it to get their info/news?

Look for metrics related to engagement

• Overall traffic (check alexa believe it or not?
• (check for bullet on slidershare)
• (check for bullet on slideshare)

Evaluating authorship

If google can tell a site has a real person behind it, there is more authority than a PageRank 7 site no one reads.  A real person who provides thought in their niche, that shares their content socially, and has comments is a better link prospect.

• Rel=author can help google determine authentic content and the links contained therin
• Author trust can flow through the content they create, establishing valuable links
• Obvious SERP visibility benefit

Content Marketing

• Great content builds your brand audience.
• Great content drives traffic and brand exposure in tandem with high value links
• Great content is highly shareable
  • Link bait
  • Infographics
  • Like, tweet, pin, stumble – social sharing buttons
  • Links generated from content marketing initiaibes are nearly always
    • Freely givn contextual and relevant
    • Lang lasting
    • Diverse
    • Crowd-source your inbound links
    • Use a variety of content mediums and topics to sculpt anchor text naturally

Make your content valuable

• Great content in tandem with publishers.  Work together and involve them as partners.
• Think about audiences of potencial publishers.  They may differ from your target audience.  Find commonalities.
• Add value for publishers. Make them look good.  Give them more than they give you.

Case study – Coca Cola

• Post on mashable – it spread across different sites
• Resulted in links to mashable post, links to website, links to service pages.

Eric Enge

• All anchor text links look bad
• Domain & brand links look, with a few anchor text looks natural

Synergy – blog shared on Google+, drives shares & links.  Get influencers to share your blog on Google+ to boost with their bigger, more diverse audience reach.  Reaching one influencer who has much higher trust yields more links, because people feel safer linking.

Create trust in one relationship – but don’t ignore others, or you look weird, not trustworthy.

Likelihood to share formula = share rate = …

Create impressions.  If a potential linker learns about you from several sources, they are more likely to link.

Relationship pyramid

Higher value = higher effot

1. 1 on 1
2. Meeting
3. Meetups
4. Blogging
5. Linkedin
6. Twitter
7. Facebook

Reach linkers by multiple channels.

Case study – jump on the opportunity as soon as it opens

• Went to SES, sat in the front row where Matt Cuts spoke (every conference for 2 straight years)
• First person to speak to him, prepared with a meaningful question that stands out.
• Rand Fishkin published post asking someone to try a project – Eric commented write away voluntaring
• Volunteer to write for Search Engine Watch when Danny Sullivan left.

Case Study – Kiss Metrics

• Guest posts on high authority sites
• Blog with good content
• Guest post on other sites 3-4 times a week.
• Allow other people to guest post on your blog, because writer will share it

Q&A: SEO Link Building

SEO Link Building Answers from SEMPO Panel of Experts

Are there any other tactics outside relationship building?

• Eric – They may lower the value of infographics in the future, but I will continue to use it, as well as video and other assets.
• Loren Baker – funny viral videos can obtain high visibility very fast and are cheap to make
• Erin – you can go viral in your industry

What if you are in a not so sexy b2b industry?  How can you publish exciting content for SEO link building?

• Eric – work your niche, find influencers in your industry
• Loren – speak to your audience, taking photos instagrams of people on turbine manufacturing line made interesting content .
• Erin – find the fun in your industry, create fun videos and have people come to you instead of you going to them.

How can you get social engagement and build content on a small budget?

• Eric – high school kids, college kids work hard cheap and bring creativity and imagination
• Loren – Put up an ad early in the season for interns. Bring on young people and maybe you’ll find the next superstar

How do you hire a good SEO expert when you’re a new company with a little SEO knowledge?

• Eric – no easy way to answer that.  Last time we hired, we used a recruiting firm.
• Erin – go to events.  Don’t poach other people’s employees, but there are usually lots of people in the industry looking for work.

C level people look for accountability.  How do you turn social marketing into valuable sellable service?

• Eric – measure the change in non-brand organic search traffic and measure revenue/leads, etc.
• Erin – know how much a conversion is before you sign up with them
• Loren – demo how competitors rank for calls to action used in the client’s collateral (DRTV, direct mail, etc) to show relationship between SEO and other marketing channels.

The post Eric Enge Speaks at Atlanta SEMPO SEO & Social Media Event on Link Building appeared first on Blend SEO.

Paid Directories for SEO

Our M.B. SEO link builder was submitting a client website to directories and put together a registration document for paid directory submission so that the client can approve the costs before submission.  The SEO client (whose name has been removed) had these questions:

I am not familiar with site directory registration and optimization and have a question about the [client] document for approval.  Can you tell me why Bing and Google are not included on the directory listing?  Is it because they rely on these other directory/paid engines?

The question reveals the SEO client has some confusion between directories and search engines and how one affects the other.  Also, with the recent news about paid link penalties, other clients have been asking how paid directories are viewed by search engines.

The Difference Between Directories and Search Engines.

An internet directory, like a phone directory, simply provides a listing of websites with some information about each one.  Like a phone book, a user can browse a directory by categories to find different websites.Search engines, unlike directories crawl the world wide web to create a searchable list of all websites.  Directories rely on a person to submit the websites listed.  Search engines will crawl directories to find websites.  Listing your website in a directory is one way to help search engines find it.

Why are Bing and Google Not Listed Among the Directories?

The Yahoo directory is actually separate from the Yahoo search engine.  Neither Bing nor Google have a paid directory, like Yahoo does.  Google and Bing are search engines only. However, Bing, Google and Yahoo all have a searchable index of local business listings where you can submit your business, but that’s a different Blend-ER SEO Blog post.

Effect of Paid Directory Submission on Search Engines

These paid directories where we submit your website provide a valuable link to your website.  The directory listing and the link help verify the authenticity of your website to search engines.  The payment is for the directory to perform a manual review of your website to decide if it passes quality guidelines.  Search engines give more credit to listings in these directories than others that accept all submissions without a review process.  Matt Cutts, the head of Google Spam team describes this valuable distinction of selective paid link directories compared to paid text links in his blog.

The post How Do Paid Directories Affect SEO & Search Engine Rankings? appeared first on Blend SEO.

SEO copy software – The Death of Search Engine Optimization

Reciprocal link building became widespread by webmasters and SEOs in the 90’s and continues today.  Some people do it manually one link at a time, while others use automated programs to search prospects, contact them, check for the back link and publish the reciprocal link.  Some internet marketers sell reciprocal link building software while others sell against it. In some cases it will get you penalized by Google.  But in other cases, you can find websites that dominate their targeted keywords whose backlinks are filled with insestual reciprocal links. You may wonder…

• “If I trade links with someone who emailed me with a reciprocal link offer, will it hurt or help me?”
• “Can I use a reciprocal link building program without penalizing my website?”
• “I think its OK if they link to me, but should I link to them?”

To find out the answer to your questions, forget everything you ever heard or think you know about SEO.  Think about your own website visitors.  Why do your visitors go to your website?  Would someone on your website be interested in reading what is published on another website?  Remember the term “Surf the web”? For those of us who do, we would go to an interesting website, read a bit, see an enticing link and follow it.  Read some more there, until we either get bored with it and hit the back button, or come across another enticing link and read some more there.  Those were the days before link building…before the knowledge of link affects on search engines polluted the activities of webmasters.

Go back to the ideals of these pre-link building days.

Create links for your visitors and you will be rewarded for quality outbound and inbound links.

That is one of the goals of Google.  “No follow” code for links addressed some of the spam link building activities.  Google algorithm updates over the years have aimed at rewarding or penalizing visitor benefiting links and spammy links made just for the purpose of having one more link.

Reciprocal Link Directory: Good or Bad Idea?

Sometimes webmasters would publish a list of related references that they respected. However, unless the sole purpose of your website is to be directory, it makes no sense to create an index of outbound references about every subject thinkable.  DMOZ and Yahoo Directory already covered this.  If however your website directory is full of online resources that are pertinent to your website and valuable to your visitors, such as a list of local vendors for something you provide expertise, then that makes sense.

If a resource on your website is indeed valuable to your visitors, it is likely valuable to visitors of other similar websites… and it would make sense for those websites to link to your resource.  It would also make sense for you to link to it from prominent pages of your own website.  Search engines can read relevance in the language.  Search engines like Google know what words are related to others because they read content from all over the web and remember which words appear together (this is called a semantic relationship between keywords).  Search engines like Google determine the value of a directory (or any other web page) based on inbound links.  By linking out to other excellent resources, you can create a valuable resource.  This is the original idea behind a directory, and it still holds true, as long as you make it a good one for your particular visitors.

The post The Truth About Reciprocal Link Building for SEO appeared first on Blend SEO.

Frequently SEO consultants and SEO tool providers create and circulate videos promoted as how-to or help resource videos.  But a lot of time these videos have little helpful content amidst a lot of marketing.  Want to save some time?  This video by Ken McGaffin, Chief Marketing Officer of WordTracker is over an hour long. Here is my review of the video on linkbuilding, produced by WordTracker.

For starters, the webpage containing the video gives a list of  How-To’s for the hardest parts of linkbuilding.  It makes claims to solve the hardest problems in linkbuilding.  However, on the outset of the video, you are given a list of some pretty elementary topics.

1. 6 ways link building helps your website.
2. Why would another site link to yours
3. How to find quality link prospects
4. How to determine a quality link?
5. How to get organic links (backlinks without asking)
6. Pitfalls of most link building campaigns
7. How to Plan a blog campaign. 

Keep reading below the video for my in depth review before you watch.

After an introduction selling you on the importance of linkbuilding,  you are given a sales pitch to purchase this linkbuilding tool. For the most part, the demo of the tool WordPress Link Builder gives you a start to end process of managing your linkbuilding campaign.  Some common tools are built in.  For the most part, these tools can be replicated by using advance search parameters in search engines, for example to find back links for your competitive websites.

As far as finding link prospects, I can do much better using Aaron Walls SEOBook Hub Finder tool.  This tool actually gives you common backlinks for your top competitors for a keyword phrase.  The WordPress Link Builder tool, on the other hand falls short in that it simply gives you backlink counts for websites that you enter, as well as another screen for backlink counts for sites that rank for a keyword.  SEO Quake and SEOBook browser plugins can give you this info at a glance or export to a spreadsheet.

The Hubfinder tool does this for you, AND narrows your search by only providing those backlink sources that are COMMON between your keyword competitors (and of course you can specify additional competitors into that mix).  Of course the Hubfinder tool ONLY comes with a $300 per month membership.  It’s up to you whether you want to save time or money.  You can do the same thing by hand by compiling a spreadsheet of keyword competitor backlinks and searching for common domains among the backlinks of your top keyword competitors.

The other major tool I see in the video for thisWordTracker Link Builder tool is a PageRank indicator for each domain providing a backlink, as well as the ability to order prospects in your list by their backlink counts.  So you have backlinks to competitors and counts for their backlinks.  I suppose that’s good if you are in a hurry and don’t want to bother thinking about anything else.  I generally use more ways to judge the quality of a link prospect.  For example:

• How many unique domain outgoing links are on that page? 
• Is it a .edu or .gov top level domain?
• Does the site have .edu or .gov backlinks?
• Are the links using no-follow code? (duh)
• How old is the backlink prospect?

Later in the video, Ken McGaffin gives a list of 12 questions to consider in deciding if a site would be a high quality backlink.  This is very good information, however not built into the tool.  You can find spreadsheet templates out there with checklists built in for these items.

1. Is the site relevant to your website?
2. Does the site link out and are they real links?
3. Are the pages indexed by Google?
4. Does the site invite submissions or guest posts?
5. Has the site been around for a while?
6. an you find the humans behind the site and are they easy to contact?
7. Does the site have a good number of inbound links?
8. Have the articles been published recently?
9. Is the editorial of good quality?
10. Does the editorial attract comments?
11. Are the links in the body copy?
12. Do the links stay in place?

Besides these tools I mentioned, the main other uses of the link building tool WordTracker is selling is management.  It lets you check different back link prospects from the list and and them to a sub list that you can label.  There are places to enter notes for each prospect, etc.

WordTracker Link Builder leaves it up to you to decide how to apply these questions.  I like to keep a spreadsheet with a lot of these questions where the answer is in number form using some sort of ranking.

Here is where most of the learning and teaching in the video comes in.  The tool that Ken McGaffin demos is not that impressive, but he does give some good examples of digging up subcategories. He shows where you can find related communities of bloggers.  There’s no secret really to finding them other than surfing around within a "community" of interlinked websites. He gives examples of link bait, such as the www.willitblend.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss viral videos, controversial articles, surveys, contents, lists, etc.

 Ken McGaffin of WordTracker also gives a list of pitfalls for link builders. These are what he identifies as the most common problems for link building campaigns.

1. Doesn’t create a good enough reason to link
2. Doesn’t spend enough time researching who is important
3. Goes for quantity over quality
4. Expects immediate results
5. Doesn’t engage with the specific community
6. Doesn’t work link building into their regular routine.

At the end of the video, Ken McGaffin describes  the process WordTracker performed in a link building campaign centering the SEO Blogger keyword tool.  This includes

• a synopsis of research

• creating the tool

• commissioned a book about the tool

• created section of content on the website about the tool

• directly contacted authority individuals in the market and asked their opinion of the tool before launch

• wrote and distributed customized press releases for different markets

• tweeted about the SEO Blogger tool launch

The video closes with some more calls to action to buy the WordTracker Link Builder tool.

The post Expert review of linkbuilding video produced by WordTracker appeared first on Blend SEO.