All posts in linkbait

Friday saw the Distilled LinkLove conference in London, with an impressive line-up that included Rand Fishkin, Mike King and Wil Reynolds sharing their link building secrets.

Whether you’re agency or client-side, here is a useful little guide to link building tools and resources which Distilled gave out to help you improve on your link building activities:

Tools & Resources

Name Type What is it used for? Free / Paid
My Blog Guest Community Finding places to guest post Free & Paid versions
Blogger Link Up Community Link bloggers with content creators Free
Haro Community Link journalists with sources Free
Boomerang Browser Plugin Helping you with email outreach Free & Paid versions
Rapportive Browser Plugin Finding out more about the person you’re reaching out to Free
Multi Links for Firefox Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time rather than individually Free
Chrome Web Scraper Browser Plugin Scraper is a Google Chrome extension for getting data out of web pages and into spreadsheets Free
Chrome Link Clump Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time Free
Buzzstream Software Managing outreach process Paid
GroupHigh Software Finding people to outreach to Paid
Raven Tools Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Open Site Explorer Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid
Ontolo Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Majestic SEO Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Zemanta Tactic Suggests your content to relevant bloggers Paid
Followerwonk Tool Contacting people & building relationships Free & Paid versions
Tom Anthony’ Link Profile Tool Tool Analyse your competitors link profiles and those of competitors to discover anomalous activities Free
JavaScript Bookmarklets Tool Use bookmarklets to improve efficiency of reporting and analysis Free
We Follow Tool Directory of Twitter users organized by interests Free
Citation Labs Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free
Linkdex Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid versions
Link Diagnosis Tool Backlink analysis & broken link checker Free
Link Builder from Wordtracker Tool Backlink analysis Free & Paid versions
Blog Dash Tool A permission-based blogger database Paid
Seeded Buzz Tactic Allows you to promote content to relevant bloggers Free & Paid versions

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With the recent “Panda” Google quality update one of the key changes was that low quality content and links within it have been discounted by Google. It means that

not only so-called content farms got hit by the Panda update, but also sites which heavily relied on content farms for inbound links.

Perhaps the most obvious casualty was article marketing. If article marketing was  one of your key link building tactics prior to the Panda update, you finally have to adapt to modern link building and link baiting techniques that still work in 2011.

 

In this list I focused on common sense, widely used techniques, of which you’ll find plenty of examples on the Web. I didn’t want to be particularly creative and spectacular. So if you are Eric Ward or Michael Martinez you might not find anything new here.

For everybody else: check the list to find out whether you use all of them or at least those fitting best in your area, niche or industry.

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When it comes to link building one of the most important aspects of it is the optimisation of the actual link. Whether getting the link voluntarily or by contacting webmasters, you have to exert the utmost influence on the link itself. Unfortunately this is also a Catch 22.

When you start controlling the appearance of your link it stops being a natural link.

Thus Google can use filters on such a link to determine it’s ”manufactured”.

So there is a really volatile relationship between links being natural and useful for SEO. Most successful SEO techniques have been abused in the past by spammers so that Google tweaks its algo to curb overtly artificial link building.

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Denouncing SEO is a popular sport these days on the Web. It always draws crowds. Over the years the simple “SEO is spam”, “SEO is dead” or “SEO has no future” rants have worn out though as they have no basis and have been repeated far too often without any proof.

The sport of denouncing SEO has evolved.

Bloggers, journalists and entrepreneurs of the aspiring kind denounce SEO while understanding the importance of it. The obvious linkbaits do not work anymore so these people have to come up with some theory of SEO that makes at least some sense before they denounce it.

Also by now we witness a variation of motives to denounce SEO.

It’s not just the folly of mistaking SEO for spam or the attention grabbing anymore, you don’t get as many links for denouncing SEO these days, it’s too common by now. So you have to at least try to prove the point of your rant or at least package it in a way that does not look like one.

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Those who know me outside of my role as an SEOptimise writer are aware that I advocate a new approach to SEO called SEO 2.0 which encompasses both social media and SEO elements. I haven’t pushed my own agenda here on SEOptimise but I still believe that it’s true.

On the modern Web you don’t focus solely on Google or other search engines.

Some people mistake SEO 2.0 for a buzzword that means social media marketing but it’s not that either. SEO 2.0 is a holistic approach. Some experts call it digital asset asset optimization, some findability, some inbound marketing. The concepts are very similar. They all try to make sense of the current Webscape as a whole. Like SEO 2.0 they do not artificially differentiate between search and social media. They combine them. Saying SEO is better than social media or vice versa is like saying that

for cars using the wheels is better than the engine.

2010 is the year of the infographic. Infographics are probably the most popular way not only to visualize data but also to get links this year. In modern SEO linkbait is the most common method of “link building”. To be more exact: Linkbaiting is not link building as you don’t build them manually like say in directory submission but you create content and then get the links by people you do not even contact.

Infographics have proven ideally suited to both spread awareness about issues and as viral content people share and link to.

It’s surprising though that SEO blogs and forums rarely deal with the creation of infographics to get links and exposure. The reason for this lack of tutorials may be the interdisciplinary approach an infographic requires.

Steve Rubel and his ridiculous ‘SEO is dead’ escapade during the Google Instant presentation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to articles about SEO from outsiders.

Now that SEO has gone mainstream and everbody deals with it many people write about SEO who have barely a clue about it. Others, often web designers who know the basics of SEO from 5 or 10 years ago spread their outdated advice today.

Journalists, bloggers from outside the industry and writers for publications completely unrelated to SEO attempt to “join the conversation”. I have no problem with that.

Make your homework first though and then write. Also make sure to accept feedback. Some bloggers don’t like me pointing out their mistakes and delete my comments instead. Thus I decided to write about it where they can’t.

Time flies by. It’s more than two years by now that I write the highly popular “30+” list blog posts to get links and traffic for SEOptimise. I’ve often tried to abandon them, to write tutorials or other types of postings but list posts with around 30 items still rule. They get the most

  • shares on social media
  • links
  • attention
  • traffic

for several reasons.

This year some of the big guys in the SEO blogosphere started doing 30 something lists as well, SEOmoz does them, SEL compiles them. They even surpass my lists in some cases as they spend obviously more time on them than I do. Their success with this technique has just confirmed to me that 30+ lists work. That’s why I will tell you how to write them.

We all love case studies. Who is we? We in the SEO industry, we in social media and online marketing, we business people. Case studies show on real life examples, real websites, projects and campaigns that something works.

Good case studies are more than proof though. They also show you how to market or optimize a site. They show an example of how it actually works.

Case studies combine both, the insight of a how to articles and the business proof of a finished campaign. They shows the results from experience.

These are some of the reasons why I’ve collected a comprehensive list of 30 SEO, social media & marketing case studies that prove the ROI of it All.

Yes, the ROI in SEO, social media and other kinds of online marketing is still too often fuzzy. We want success stories, numbers and explanations so that we can reenact the steps you need to succeed. So here they are, enjoy:

Recently I’ve read one of those awfully misguided anti-SEO posts. It linked to another blog post called SEO FAQ. It wasn’t an actual SEO FAQ though. It was just another awfully misguided blog post from a guy I have never heard of before and who only reveled in the attention he got from displaying his ignorance. People got angry as usual in such cases of blatant provocation and disregard.

Sadly the Google algorithm still sometimes prefers those who raise hell instead of those who provide useful resources.

So that completely useless SEO FAQ ranks at #2 for SEO FAQ in Google.com and misleads lots of people looking for answers to most basic SEO questions.

Thus I decided to provide a new SEO FAQ. I want to outrank this fake resource. Also I want you to copy these questions and to provide your own answers on your own blog.

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