SEO 101

Link Building to Directories & Link Opportunities

Link Building to Directories and Link Opportunities with Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal. Loren discusses some tools that he uses for a linkbuilding campaign. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 53m
Broadcast on:: 06 Apr 2009
Audio Format:: other

Link Building to Directories and Link Opportunities with Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal. Loren discusses some tools that he uses for a linkbuilding campaign.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

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Visit helpjuesnow.org That's helpjuesnow.org The opinions expressed on this webmasterradio.fm program are those of the host, guest and callers and do not reflect those of the staff, management or advertisers of webmasterradio.fm Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program without the express written consent of webmasterradio.fm is prohibited. Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basis. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and I am proud to introduce my new co-host Eric Lander. He's an independent SEO consultant many of you probably have heard of. He's got over 9 years of experience and a wealth of respect from the SEO industry. I can see more of his stuff at EricLander.com. How are you doing, Eric? I'm doing well, Ross. How about you? Great. Welcome to the show, man. Great to have you on. Thank you very much. I look forward to being part of this on a weekly basis. Yes. So, tell us a little more about you quickly before we move on here. Okay. What are you up to? So, right now I'm basically just working as an independent consultant, recently concluded a student as a Fortune 300 SEO working in-house. So I've kind of got a pretty good mix of working for clients as well as working for big brands in-house. I'm trying to go back to my roots a little bit now and working out of the private practice. So that's where I'm at for the man, you know, for the time being. It must have found out quite a change, working from home, getting back into that grind. It's a lot more enjoyable. We'll say that. Excellent. Yeah, I love it, too. I do that occasionally myself. Well, thanks for being here, and today we also have fantastic, we have got a great guest as well. Sean Baker, the owner of Search Engine Journal, and thanks for being here, Lauren. How long have you been doing this? It must be nine, ten more than that, how many years? Yeah, I think we're pretty much on the 10/11 year mark, which has been a long time. I started an SEO and well, primarily link building back in 1998/1999, and that's when I was in school. I was finishing up University, and everyone else in the marketing department was going down to in the downtown Baltimore to do ad internships, and I decided to roll the dice a little bit with a, with a, with a job at a small internet marketing firm that was launching out of someone's house. That's how it all got started. So what firm was that? Is it changed? Is that Search Engine Journal now? No, I was working as an intern with a firm called Web Advantage out of, out of Harford County, Maryland. And then started Search Engine Journal a couple of years later. Well, that's certainly a steam place I love going there and reading stuff, and Eric, I believe you write for Search Engine Journal too, don't you? In theory, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's been a while, but I definitely helped Lauren out behind the scenes as the associate editor, and I think I've been on board for, I'm going to guess, Lauren, what, going on about two years now? Yeah, pretty much two years. Eric, Eric's done a very good job of kind of calling me out and letting me know when stuff's going well and when stuff's not, he's kind of like, you know, I got him a little angel and one shoulder and Eric on the other one, so he keeps me at check. I guess I'm going to say thank you for that. No, but Eric, yeah, he's been great and I appreciate all the time you put into the blog to Eric. It's not a problem. I think it's a great community. I love the fact that there's so many readers and there's always, no matter what you write, you're always bound to get great commentary back from the readers, so that's great stuff. Yes. So we're talking a little bit about link building today, Lauren, and I know that's a large component to sort of the services that you offer. Since, you know, we're trying to sort of introduce our audience to some of the basics about link building, I guess. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you see link building, maybe why it's important in the SEO field, maybe some of the things that you like to look for while building links for a client? Oh, of course, sure. Let me get started and kind of going back a little bit in time back to about 10, 11 years ago when I started in internet marketing. Back then, this was before Google even became anything in terms of search. We used to go out and build links to drive targeted traffic to a client site, so along with placing banner ads on a site or trying to build partnerships, link building was one of the major parts of the internet marketing mix. Now, at the time, instead of measuring the links via metrics such as, you know, page rank or page strength or linkscape juice or whatnot, we would measure the value of links in the analytics back end of our clients in terms of which links were driving traffic and also which links were driving conversion. Now, the internet was a bit smaller back then and it was a lot easier to obtain a high visibility link on a relevant site to one of our clients, so we would normally email a webmaster and say, hey, you know, can we get a link next to your navigation menu or hey, can we get a link right there on your specific page and they would be more than happy to obtain the email and have a little bit of attention and usually place a link. So after a while when we were tracking the analytics and tracking the conversions from those links to sing into these links for actually driving traffic with strove sales, we would identify the traffic generators and the sales generators and kind of focus on that niche online, then Google got into the, you know, into the market and they came out with their, you know, links-based algorithm. So all of our clients inherently obtained great Google rankings from the beginning. And now I've taken that same philosophy through the years and have applied that to our current link building structure with search engine journal services. So I think that a lot of the core, the core techniques of link building are still more or less around and they really pay off in terms of, you know, finding sites that are authorities in the niche field, finding, you know, building relevant links and keeping in mind that these links should be driving a person to your site who's interested in the content on your site because at the end of the day, Google more or less builds their algorithm for the end user. So you don't want to link, you don't want to build links thinking that, oh, this is going to rank me number one in Google, you want to build links with the mindset that these links are going to bring in targeted traffic. So that must be pretty difficult keeping up like for the average person, let's say who's running our business and you know, a lot of people don't have the time or frankly even the money to spend a lot of time doing link building. What do you recommend they do? I mean, let's say they've got a blog, what should they do to try and build these kind of links but with this little time as possible? Well, there's a couple of first very basic steps. The business launches a blog or say if a blogger is launching a business oriented blog and once that blog starts to generate some content and you know, to get out there, I mean your first step more or less is to search for blog directories, authority blog directories like best of the web blog directory, bloggers is another good one, there's sites like blog up all of these blog directories have categorical listings of different blogs. So for example, my wife recently launched an exercise blog. So one of the first things she did was after she got the blog together, you don't want to go and do this when you only have one post, you want to get like about five or ten posts on the blog to show that you're actually writing is she went out there and found these blog directories that have exercise categories and listed her blog there. And what happens is there's an instant correlation of that blog being in the exercise vertical because it's in the exercise category. So take your business category, whether you're a plastics engineer, whether you sell plasma TVs or maybe you're a tree expert and find that relevant category in some of these large blog directories. And actually if you search Google for blog directories, we have a list on search engine journal that ranks about number two and number three right now. I suggest starting there. Nicely done. Now Lauren, you're talking about some really great resources here if you, you know, if you're running a blog or you're sort of powering your site with a blog backend for someone who is maybe doing some SEO for a small business site or something like that that isn't really in the blogosphere, are similar resources like best of the web or other directories a good place to start for acquiring inbound links? Yeah, you know, it's a good foundation. You know, I would suggest going out there and looking at, you know, best of the web, the Yahoo directory. I mean, basically those are your starting points, you know, because those were, you're not only going to get a little bit of page records used to your site, but you're also going to get that correlation I was talking about. It actually helps the engines categorize your site. Also, you know, dmoz, dmoz.org, the open directory project, open source directory owned by AOL. Submit your site there. Now, that's the beginning. Now, what you really want to do is go out there, say you have a business site and yeah, it's not a blog, so you're not going to be submitting the blog directories, but go out there and look for targeted directories in your vertical. So taking like the exercise example again, you know, the gym I go to, they have a web site. Now it's not a blog, but it's an informative website about exercise and stuff like that. And it would make sense for them to look for other, you know, other niche targeted vertical directories. So do a search on Google for exercise directories, health directories, health sites, health forums, health resources. And also you can add, you can add terms on your query, like add URL or submit URL, because usually the directories will have a little link on them. This is add URL. So Google will actually find that text and return to you in the SERPs a list of the directories that you should probably be submitting your site to. So learn those, there's so many directories out there. I've always kind of wondered, like we do our own link building sometimes and we certainly work with clients that do, but you get so many directories out there, how can that stuff really be? There's so many, does Google really apply a lot of value to them? I mean, if you get, I guess you're always getting the same category that's going to start to add up, but is that really all it is, just getting that relevance all the time? Well I can honestly say that out of, so you have people launching directories and blogs and sites every day, and there are probably hundreds of thousands of web directories out there. So what? There's only about .005% that actually have a lot of value. You're not going to want to go out and participate in one of these programs where you're submitting your site to thousands upon thousands of directories, because basically those links have no value whatsoever. So instead of spending your time, or instead of paying someone to do something like that, find the ones that you feel, or that the search industry feels have the most value. And one way to do that is looking at their backlinks, or looking at the authority sites that actually link to those directories. Okay. But we can always go beyond directories here. I don't want to turn this into a directory show, you know. No, no, no, it's just, I know it comes up a lot in questions, and I think it's a valuable one, because, you know, Yahoo is obviously worthwhile, of course it's $2.99 or whatever it is per year, but I understand that's worth the value, so that makes sense. But you get to these other ones, and some of them charge, how do you know whether or not it's worthwhile? It's, I guess you look at how many links are pointing into it, just how much value Google seem to help Jews in poverty at helpjewsnow.org. Your $25 gift today will help provide a life-saving food box to Jews in need. Be a blessing right now. Visit helpjewsnow.org. That's helpjewsnow.org. Just to think it has, and then consider that then, I guess, eh? Yeah, also look at the category that you would list your site in, and if you see that there's a lot of sites in there that are kind of spam-oriented or have no value, the end result is going to be that that directory itself has no value, because there's no editors actually policing the sites that are listed in that directory. Right. The best directories tell people no, and they let a selective number of people in. All right. Well, thank you. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to touch on some more link-building issues with Lauren Baker. SEO 101 will be back, right after recess. Affiliate Convention 2009 Denver, Thursday and Friday, June 18th and 19th. Free for all affiliates, and all the information you need to know to grow your business. For more information about registration and sponsorship, visit www.affiliateconvention.com. SEOSeek.com is your one-stop site for everything SBO. From search engine marketing to pay-per-click management, SEOSeek.com delivers high-quality SEO services and affordable prices. SEOSeek.com can help you with SEO analysis, monthly reports, title and meta tag optimization, email support, and so much more. Want to keep your SEO in-house? Get our professional trainers, teach SEO to your staff. Get a free quote and a free competitive analysis today at SEOSeek.com. Does your website need a bailout looking for a conversion rate stimulus package? Do you need a website improvement to do list? On target, a subscription service from Future Now and Brian Eisenberg monitors your website 24/7, analyzing the actions of every potential customer. It gives you a to-do list. It tells you exactly what to fix and how to fix it so that more of your visitors do what you need them to do. 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My staff just filled in the little details and now we're having margarita night. Offshoring.com, fast, inexpensive, excellent and on time offshoring.com. PPC Rockstars will take you to the promised land of PPC profit. Line broadcast Mondays at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific or on demand any time inside the advertising channel only on webmasterradio.fm. Okay class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with Eric Lander, independent SEO and myself, cost down, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing Inc. Before the break we were discussing some link building issues, mostly at the beginning around directories and now we're just going to go into a few other areas. Eric, you had a question there for Lauren? Yeah, Lauren, you were talking earlier about sort of not sort of restricting link building to only directories. So to kind of follow up on that, I want to talk a little bit about how someone can go and find link opportunities and bound link opportunities that aren't necessarily directories. And as a follow up to that, maybe talk a little bit more about some of the problems that you might run into. I know one of the things that a lot of SEOs have seen and probably a lot of you know webmasters have seen are these age old spam emails that come out and say, "Hey, I think your site about X, Y, is relevant to my site, you know, about blue widgets when there really isn't any correlation." And I think that sort of polluted the value of link building and sort of the perception of how important link building is. Do you have any opinions on that? My first opinion here is that basically it all starts with your site development and your site design and your vision. If you're going out there and building one core site that's going to be a huge authority in your field and if you are constantly adding new content, photos, videos to that site, it's going to add to its inherent linkability. You've heard of the drinkability thing that they have with Miller Lite? Well, let's look at site linkability here. There are a lot of pages out there and different niche verticals that have resource pages. A lot of sites that say, "Okay, you're in the medical field, for example. You're going to find a lot of sites out there in the medical field that actually have a resource page where they'll link to Wikipedia or WebMD or, you know, some different blog posts or whatever. What you have to do is position your business site to be that authority resource and then go out there and look for resources, look for resource pages that are linking to sites similar as similar as you're similar to yours. And, you know, it's as simple as emailing sometimes. Sometimes it can be very tedious as well. But emailing sites that have resources or connecting with bloggers within your industry. Another thing I really like to tell people is that I believe in a process called trickle down linkonomics. And what I mean by that is like, "Okay, say you develop a new SEO tool." Now, are you going to spend all your time emailing every single blog and every single site in SEO? So are you going to spend a week compiling a huge Excel database and writing all these individual emails to every single SEO blogger? Or are you going to target search engine journal, search engine land, webpro news, ericlander.com? Get on a webmaster radio.fm show. So the thing is, is that what I really like to tell clients and people that ask me this is find the Michael Errington of your industry, find the blogger that's out there that everyone else listens to. If you can obtain a link in their blog post, what's going to happen is that there are so many other bloggers in that industry that read that blog post, they are going to either copy and paste some quotes from that blog post, write about the same product, they're going to scrape it, they're going to write their own take on it and chances are, if you can add a really nice spin to your product launch, ask for give out free passes to beta testers, give out free coupons, if you're a shopping site, anything along those lines, then that's going to add, that's going to bring in that whole linkability standard and it's going to give the head bloggers or the bloggers out there within your article something to actually write about and then everyone else is going to want to jump on the bandwagon because these top bloggers are writing about it. So look for the authorities and try to reach them. Very cool. I assume that you're going to be out there to register or trademark the term trickle down linkonomics soon. I hope someone doesn't steal it. Someone will write a post by the end of the day I'm sure. Now, so you're talking about targeting sort of the best fruit that's out there and kind of letting things trickle down. One of the questions that we got in advance from some of our listeners was relative to how aggressive you can become and sort of trying to build links and I think the question was more geared around how to sort of like almost throttle your initiatives. I mean, is it in your best interest to kind of set it aside maybe one day, a week, two after lengths is something that you do for an hour a day, for a few days a month. I mean, is there any best practice that you could recommend to listeners to say, if you're going to be building links of a long term, here is how to sort of throttle that work. Yeah, it's definitely something you have to focus on and you have to set time out of your day to do so. If you're doing a product launch or a new site launch, I suggest taking a lot of time before you actually launch your site to prepare your linking strategy. So don't just launch a site and then go out there and start linking a couple weeks later. You can actually build links to a site before you launch it and I'll give you a case study. I was working with a company called Handbag Planet, I believe, and they before they launched their site what they did was they had a contest where people who signed up to their email list would enter to win a free handbag. So basically on their homepage, they had a handbag contest and we put it out there on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, had bloggers writing about it and then before the site even launched, they had hundreds and thousands of links pointing to their site about the link anchor text naturally had the word handbag in it. So they were already obtaining links before the site even launched, before their e-commerce site even launched. So having that link strategy in your head before you launch can assist a lot. Now in terms of pushing the links, it's not a good idea to go out there and try to obtain everything at once. Now the example that I just gave you is kind of a different example because they were getting links as an afterthought. They were getting links of a result of a smart marketing campaign and that's kind of what you have to keep in mind when you're building links. Be smart and try to obtain these links. If you're going to go out and try and you're going to say, "I'm going to build a thousand links a day through directories," well then that's not going to work because those links have a thousand directory links or not natural. But having something that is like, I hate to use the term but link bait, having something that gives people a reason to link and then going out there an hour a day, say you write a blog post with about and you list about 20 different other sites on it or bloggers and are really resourceful like top 20 sites to find the best handbags or the best deal or fill up your wardrobe from these 20 e-commerce sites and then email them later and ask them to link back to you with their blogs, stuff like that's going to work from the beginning. So I really, I think I'm kind of including a lot here in this answer but I would really suggest that you sit down and plan out a long term linking strategy and approach. Look at things like seasonality, holidays throughout the year, when people are not buying your products and when they are, are your links going to bring in enough traffic before the holidays, before like the holiday shopping season? Are people going to be linking to your site during the summer, during the winter? A lot of bloggers, a lot of people take vacations during the summer so you might not want to send out as much linking emails because by the time they get back to work, those emails are going to be kind of like down in their inbox. So take all of that into example and plan out a year long linking structure and see how that works. But it does take dedication, you really have to sit down for about an hour a day and look at all of the different blogs out there that are writing about linking, look at all the link ideas and kind of, you know, you can't try everything. Don't be cookie cutter, take what you really feel is going to work for your site and if you have something like fat plastic fabrication. If you haven't played Best Fiends, you're seriously missing out. Best Fiends isn't like other match three style mobile puzzle games, it's an action packed adventure and a brain boosting puzzle game all rolled into one. You play through an actual storyline, watching your fiends become more powerful the more levels you beat. So if you're tired of crushing the same old candy, give Best Fiends a try. Download Best Fiends free today on the App Store or Google Play. As a business that you do, I wouldn't suggest trying to go out there and get links from like spin or search engine journal. I would suggest like concentrating on what your vertical is and building that into your plan. Makes sense? Absolutely. Lauren, we're gonna have to get you back in the show again, this is great, we don't have to do anything. This is awesome. I just got back from a conference, so if all this stuff like swirling around in my head, I have to release it somehow, I think this is the only way I can't. Excellent. One of the things that comes up occasionally is press releases. Do you use press releases to help you build links? I realized they have a short lifespan, but have you found them useful in some of your marketing? Well, the thing is that I don't send out press releases to build links from the releases or from the wire services, because a lot of those wire services, the links from those releases are actually discounted by Google anyway. What you wanna do is when you are putting out a press release push, make sure that those press releases are being delivered to the journalists and writers and bloggers within your industry. So don't go out there and send a thousand press releases thinking, "I'm gonna get hundreds and thousands of links from these press release wires, 'cause what's gonna happen is you might get some traffic from Google News or something like that, or maybe from the SERP, you'll get traffic." In terms of organic links, a lot of those services use redirected links anyway, but what's going to happen is that if, again, it's playing it smart and targeted, if you send out a really newsworthy press release, why do people send out press releases? Well, in the old days, you had news to talk about. Now people send it out for everything, but site launch is a great way to reason to send out a press release. Partnerships, great reason to send out a press release, contests, keep this in your mind again, seasonality. Say your company builds the biggest jack-o-lantern in the world, like, "Okay, you're a plastic fabrication company, and I hate to use this, but I used to have a plastic fabrications client, and it was kind of a boring vertical." So how can you take that from being boring to being awesome? You know, fabricated giant plastic jack-o-lantern, and put it right on the side of the highway, write a press release about it, send it out to all the local journalists in your area, all the Halloween sites, then you're getting these relevant links, then you're getting response from the national media, then you're getting these links because the true links of value from a press release campaign aren't from the press releases, but the other sites that pick up that news, and then link to you from what they wrote on their sites. That's very cool. So Lauren, you touched briefly on the fact that you've been kind of busy and just wrapped up a conference, and I know that conference was on Spring Breakdown in Southern Florida. I think it was on day two you had a link-building panel that featured Ray Hoffman, Brent Satoris, and Will Reynolds. Is there any information that you can take from that? I know it was sort of a small-scale conference, and a lot of the information that was shared was intentionally shared only to attendees, but is there anything coming out of that that you think is worth touching on? Yeah, of course. The information that was shared at this conference was incredibly top-notch, because this is a top-notch conference. We had the best people in search marketing, except for Ross and Eric, of course, at this conference, and Will Brent and Ray put together an incredible, well-rounded panel on link-building and not necessarily just link-building, but linking in general, because we had Brent talking about the effects of social linking to a website, Ray discussing internal linking and how changes to an internal link structure and navigation structure could have tremendous effect on the rankings of a site. And then Will talked about researching and targeting authority like e.edu links and other links via Delicious as a tool for finding these linking opportunities. So it was pretty intense in terms of link information, and I would highly suggest that people follow up with some of the IM Spring Break coverage, and then we also have another conference called Scary SEO in October that's based in Atlantic City, and hit that up because the information is going to be bigger and better and closer. Yes, and closer. Thank you. We're going to take a quick break and we come back. We're going to touch on some more information on links with Lauren Baker. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. When it comes to finding the right customers with the right keywords, all you have to remember is ABC Search. ABC Search is the world's largest privately held pay-per-click network, giving advertisers the best pay-per-click traffic with over 6 billion searches a month and industry leading protection using Click Shield. 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Topnitchnetworks.com has the answers that you've been seeking for making your business a success on a performance-only basis. And that's a good thing because my butt's falling asleep. Mobile presence, Wednesdays at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, or on demand any time inside the internet marketing channel, only on webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session, only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with Eric Langer, independent NCO and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. Before the break, we were discussing a little bit about IN spring break, a recent conference that Lauren Bigger threw out in, it was at Florida, or... Yeah, it was near Field Beach, right outside of Fort Lauderdale. Nice. Really nice. But it's the other side of the con, it's a little more work. But so tell me, with everyone accomplishing things more quickly, are there any software titles, sites, or tools you'd recommend for someone building links? Or should they stay away from that stuff? You know, generally, what I like to do is, like I said before, when I'm building links for either search engine journal or for my clients, I take more of a human approach. But there are some tools out there that can expedite some of the more tedious work and actually categorize a lot of the work that has to be put into a linking campaign. There's one that I've been looking at recently called BuzzStream, and it's basically a tool that helps you keep track of the communications between yourself and bloggers and publishers when going out and writing and pitching other site owners about putting, about them linking to you or covering your news or anything along those lines. They actually were a quasi-sponsor at IM Springbrick, and I'll be giving out a 50 free beta testing invites for BuzzStream later this week on Search Engine Journal. Not to pitch too much on tools or whatnot, but my philosophy pretty much is to use tools to expedite the work that you would normally be spending hours doing. I would not suggest using a link building tool to mass spam email thousands of bloggers at one time, but in terms of identifying sites or identifying blogs or keeping track of the communications or even keeping track of the time that you're putting into your link building, I would do so. One aspect of link building is competitive intelligence. It's looking at what the competitors in your field are also doing. Now, there are a number of tools that can assist you with your competitive intelligence. One is Yahoo! Side Explorer. The Yahoo! and using the command link colon, or link domain colon, and then putting in the domain of your competitor will expose to you the other sites out there which link to them. What you'll probably do is notice that there are some sites that are linking to not only one competitor, but two or three, and those are the resources that you want to make sure you're in as well to gain an equal footing with your competition. Then, what you want to do is identify where your competition is not so you can gain the competitive advantage. Excellent. Well, I actually do a lot of competitor analysis myself, and I actually use OptiLink. Have you used that? No, I haven't. What was the name of that again? It's called OptiLink. It's a wind road software, I believe. It's really good. I found it useful because I run that software on competitor of one of my clients. It provides me with a list of all their backlinks using Yahoo or actually got a number of search engines you can use, but as you know, Yahoo seems to be the best for delivering the data. From there, I can actually sort through the type of the average topic that is being linked from, so to see what I find is it tells me how orchestrated their link building is being on a competitor's site, and as you know, that can provide a lot of insight into just how targeted or how much work a competitor is actually doing, or whether or not, well, quite frankly, whether or not they fluked out. It's really awesome, and you can export all that sort of stuff, so that's my personal tip. I think that's a very handy tool. Now, when it comes to social media, you mentioned this, I think it springs to Taurus, mentioning something about social media and how to use links from that. I know that's a huge topic, but can you just touch on it? What would you say about using Twitter and all that? Is there a lot of value in that kind of link? Well, again, we're talking about the message versus the end product. Now, I have a Twitter account that has about, I guess I have about 3,000, 4,000 followers and I'm not sure, but a lot of those followers are in my niche market, so a lot of those followers are bloggers, or they're in the search optimization, or they have their own sites. So every once in a while, I'll send out a link from Search Engine Journal on my Twitter account. And that's kind of, I see Twitter and social media as more of a communications tool. So say, for example, you get to the front page on Sven, or you get to the front page on Dig, well, you know, those profile links themselves from the social media sites don't really, I mean, they carry value, but that's not what you're looking for within that value. You're looking for the people that, again, read those sites, the bloggers, the journalists out there that are reading those sites and then covering whatever hits that homepage. So what you'll find is someone will say, ah, get social media links, and then people will be mass submitting, like, every part of their site to dig to Sven. But what you really want to do is concentrate again on the best work, and then the end result will be the best links. Does that make sense? Totally. And I agree, I find it's a great way to build a little bit of buzz to new articles, that kind of thing. Yeah, again. I love it. Oh, sorry. Yeah. And again, like, see, I have my Twitter account, but I'm not going to sit on there all day and be like, oh, do read this post on Search Engine Journal, read that post on Search Engine Journal. Vote for this. I'm going to share, and I used to do that. And a lot of people like Eric, like, you know, slapped me around afterwards. So what I found was that when I actually go out there and I use this, that's when I was new to Twitter, don't get me wrong, but when I use Twitter as an organic tool to kind of, it's kind of almost like a mind mapping tool, because what I want to do with Twitter is share what I find to be important. And then what I notice is that people follow me not to see what I'm pitching, but what I feel is important out there in industry. So if I have a really good post on Search Engine Journal, I'm going to put it on my Twitter feed. If I find a really good post on Step Fourth's SEO blog, I'm going to put it on there too. So I'm sharing, and at the end of the day, the followers are listening to your voice. Your followers, your friends are listening to what you have to say. And you know, I might introduce a really cool Step Fourth blog post, someone who only reads Search Engine LAN, you know what I mean? And they might cover that on their blog. So it's all about communication and trust in social media. And that's a really good point. I just follow up. I'm definitely not the poster child for effective Twitter use. I think we all kind of wrestle with how to make the most of it initially. And that's kind of a good segue. One of the big things that a lot of people were sort of upset about, and I'm just going to throw out a number and say this is maybe about six months or so ago, Twitter profile pages that used to allow you an opportunity to list a URL. And that URL initially never had a nofollow apply to it, and now it does. And one of the questions that we got from listeners in advance to the show here is about nofollow usage. And whether or not you think Google or other search engines view the nofollow as some sort of indication of trying to gain the system or manipulate otherwise natural linking schemes for the purpose of, you know, benefiting for rankings, traffic, whatever the case is. When nofollow came out, the conception, the view of nofollow was basically that it was called a link condom, right? So it's like almost like saying I'm going to protect someone from this juice that I'm putting out there with this nofollow tag. But now it's kind of been used as more of a way to communicate with the search engines to say, well, you know, this is user-generated content. This is a user-generated link, and Twitter has no power over who places which links there. So Eric might, you know, start a Twitter account with a link to his, you know, authority blog on search marketing, but there's thousands of people out there starting Twitter accounts of links to Viagra sites, to, you know, to casino sites, to gambling. So Twitter's not going to want to necessarily spread their link juice, spread their authority to all these gambling sites, and it's kind of, you know, you can't really pick one over the other. You can't have someone sitting there on Twitter, you know, reviewing every single profile. Okay, do you think, I guess what I'm coming to here is what do you look for in, like, the ultimate high quality link? If someone was going to just get one link, let's just say one link, is it Yahoo? Are they going to pay for it? Or are they going to just, what do you think? Like I know Yahoo is a big one, and a lot of people do don't mind paying for it, but what would you say? Would you say that's worthwhile? Well, this is, this, this question has been asked a lot over the past, over the years. So like, you know, what happened, what do you do with that $1,000 link budget? What do you do with that $500 link budget? I, you know, Yahoo has a lot of value, but I've seen sites that don't necessarily link, have a link from Yahoo, do well also. It's kind of rough, but you know, if you're talking about $299 from Yahoo, it's more or less worth it, because it's going to help you a little bit with Yahoo's search as well. And best of the web, I think it's like 275, I believe, for a lifetime value link. So those are more or less cool. What's going to happen also is that, you know, when you say like where do you put your quality link, the first thing that came to my head was where on the site do you put it? And you know, also having a high quality link from high quality content that's targeted towards your site is very important also. I think there's a common, very common misconception in the SEO community that blog linking does not bring a lot of value, and this is something that I want to bring up. A lot of people say, well, you know, if a blog covers me and they link to me and that blog post is only on their home page for one day, and then it gets archived, then it has no value. Well, actually, you know, it's quite the opposite. Look at Boing Boing, for example, they write about everything, you know? So if you get a link from Boing Boing on their home page, it's up there for a day. It's not necessarily going to help you in Google, but what's really going to help you is that once that blog post becomes archived, look at the URL structure, look at the bread come from structure, that blog post, it's going to be like boingboing.net/technology/ you know, scooters and then an archived page of the blog post and a post about your scooter company or scooter product that was put out, you can't get much more targeted than that. So I'd also say that, you know, spend the money on Yahoo, spend the money on best of the web again, but really spend time on trying to obtain some targeted blog posts, make friends with the bloggers in your industry, because it's going to pay off in the long run and make real friends with them, help them out. Boingboing. Yeah, actually Lauren, that's a really good topic that you brought up in terms of archived blog posts. And I want to go back to something that I heard at SMX Seattle last year as it was June of '08. And I'm going to credit Todd Freeze and otherwise I'm his oilman with us because I think he's the one who brought it up and if it's not, then I apologize. But in short, he was saying that a lot of times, or at least at that point, and certainly things are, you know, probably changed since then, he was able to go in or he was aware of people being able to go in into archived blog posts, go in and actually edit the body of the posts and insert links to competitors. And the result of that was actually a penalization handed down by Google to the competitor site because it was perceived to be as a potential purchase link because they sort of had this archived blog post sitting there and they knew that it was there, you know, they knew the content of the post, they knew that it wasn't changed, they knew that it was archived, but then magically, you know, X months after the fact someone went in and changed that. So that's definitely an interesting topic. It couldn't be Todd yet. Yeah, it is. And you know, you know, as a website owner, as a blog owner, I'm sure you guys get the emails all the time. Yeah, pay you $100, $500 bucks if you add this sentence to your blog post or if you had this sentence to the bottom of your post or whatnot, if you're a publisher, don't fall for that. You know, you've written a blog post, that's your property. You can earn money in other ways, don't, you know, don't spam out your site to some guy sending you links to add to what you've already done. And take that philosophy also if you're trying to build links yourself, expect, expect the quality from these blog posts that you deserve as a company. So yeah, yeah, don't, don't, I don't know, we can policy or you guys can edit this out. So Lauren, just a, I guess a final question here, obviously, search engine journal is an awesome place to go for a lot of this, to keep up to date on some of the latest techniques, some tips, that kind of stuff. What other resources can you recommend for someone interested in learning more about building links and just keeping on the cutting edge? Well, yeah, like you said, we pretty much cover linking on a daily basis on search engine journal. Another blog that my good friend, Deborah Masler has is the link spiel. Deborah is awesome. She's been doing links forever. And I would suggest going, just search for Deborah link building on Google, you'll probably find her blog first. And the link spiel is a good one. You know, I, you know, I follow a performance thing a lot actually that's a, that's a, that's a blog that writes for bloggers and also search engine watch, search engine watch forums, have a lot of information about linking and link building. Also I would suggest a webmaster world and create a site forums because they are, those forums are very policed because if you go to some of these other forums and you go to the link building section, you're going to get a lot of misinformation. So, you know, go to the sites in the forums that have people that are active in industry writing for them. And I also suggest SEO MOS. Excellent. Well, thank you, Lauren. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4 web marketing and Eric Lander, independent SEO. Thank you, Lauren, for joining us today on SEO 101. It's been awesome. You're welcome. Great answers and, and love blowing, blowing. It's great. Yeah. Yeah, you're welcome. Can I also add one blog to that list? Yes. Go for it. Weep w-i-e-p dot net. This is an excellent link building blog, w-i-e-p dot net. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Weep or yep dot net. Check it out. They put out really good information on an ongoing basis about linking as well. Awesome. Thanks very much. Nice to add on. Okay. Well, I look forward to seeing everyone next week and have a great day. You should be saving for the future, but savings accounts suck, and investing can be scary. We combine the ease of savings with the real returns of investing. We call it save vesting, and it's only available in our new app, Stairs. Stairs offers 4-6% returns, no fees, and you can withdraw anytime. Do your future a favor. Visit StairsApp.com today. (upbeat music)