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30 Link Building/Link Baiting Techniques That Work in 2011

Tad Chef — Thu, 19 May 2011 13:15:08 +0000

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.

When I refer to ‘links’ in link building, I don’t just mean only old school “a href” links but also new school links like Facebook likes or tweets.

Guest blogging

While Matt Cutts has already warned that guest blogging might be not the best way to get links, it’s still a widely used technique and as far I can see it works quite well. You can get authority links from top blogs this way.

Infographics

2010 was the year of the infographic. With the slow demise of Digg, where most infographics have been pushed, and the over-saturation of the web with all kinds of infographics, it’s not as successful as it used to be but still a valid technique to get both large numbers of links and good ones as well.

Blog commenting

It’s not what you think. Blog commenting for SEO is not about worthless “thank you great post” bot comments and keyword stuffing in the “name” input. Blog commenting for SEO is about suggesting a resource that might get included in the article, or better forging a relationship with a blogger who then links to you of her/his own accord.

Widgets

Widgets are often considered an annoyance that clutter your blog sidebar. They don’t have to be. Also, they still can be awesome for link building. Just take a look at LinkWithin, the related posts widget many blogs use. It’s not very accurate when it comes to determining which posts are really related, but it’s nonetheless hugely popular for its ease of use.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing, when applied to blogs, can mean asking people for contributions to a blog post on Twitter. There are even better ways to apply crowdsourcing. An excellent example has been provided by DIYSEO blog recently. They have featured 40+ SEO experts in a monumental group interview on the worst mistakes small businesses make when it comes to SEO. The more people contribute, the more will like, tweet and link back. I just did!

Freebies

Offer a free service or software package to get links and you’ll see that you get far more links than your paid-only competition. So making sure that there is a free entry level plan for your SaaS app is saved money when it comes to marketing and tedious manual link building.

Web hosting

Major web hosters still successfully give away web hosting plans for charities, blogs and artists. In exchange, they get a link or button which says “hosted by x”. All of the above mentioned can get quite popular and get many links themselves. Thus your link gets quite a lot of juice as well.

Web design

Many web design agencies offer discounts, or even require all clients to link back to them. Of course forcing clients to do so is a bad business practice, but offering incentives is perfectly fine.

Niche directories

While most web directories were discounted long before the latest quality update, one kind of directory has been gaining trust over the years and has been recommended by Google employees: high quality, selective niche directories. They must be highly relevant, topical and/or local in nature.

Trackbacks

Having a WordPress blog allows you to automatically trackback or pingback other blogs. While most links will be nofollow, it is still a very powerful link building tool that also allows you to reach out to other link-minded bloggers. Simply link out to actual posts by other bloggers or manually add the trackback URI they offer. Even some bigger news outlets allow trackbacks and pinkbacks.

Contacting brand evangelists

I couldn’t come up with a really good name for this technique, but it’s one of the best working ones these days. It’s about finding out who is talking about your site, brand, products or services and contacting them. Then you say politely “thank you” and add an incentive to link back to you. This might be as simple as suggesting adding a link to your site they forgot last time.

Going after competitors’ links

Competitor analysis is perhaps the most common and hailed link building tactic these days by SEO experts. I do not like it very much, as mining competitors’ links is more an analysis tool than actual link building method, but at the end of the day you’ll discover all kinds of links your competition got and you can employ similar tactics to get them as well.

Blogger relations

Blogger relations is one of the most obvious but neglected link building techniques. There aren’t enough journalists to cover every company and industry, but for each niche there are (in most cases) numerous bloggers interested in that subject.

Bloggers are always glad to get invited to a fair, be given a product sample to test or just get the latest scoop on new products. Blogger relations is not about spamming bloggers with a generic press release once a week.

Contests

“Tweet this” or “like us” to “win an iPad” type contests still seem to work. They’ve become a bit common lately, so try to stand out a bit rather than being just another generic contest.

Free premium content

White papers and other ebooks or PDFs still get a lot of attention and links. Just consider this excellent white paper one by Hootsuite on social media metrics.

Interviews

When conducting interviews on my SEO 2.0 blog I never did it for the links, but I was glad to see that most interview partners link back to the interview I did with them.

Testimonials

Provide testimonials: you praise the products/services you love anyway and they link to you.

Badges

The Ad Age 150 is perhaps the best example of how a badge can work. Of course they rank #1 for marketing blogs. We also link to the list.

Rants

Write when angry and offend people and you’ll get links. At least by people who will link to you for being a jerk. I know this is isn’t really right but Google does not make a sentiment analysis. The links count. Just check out who still outranks us in the UK for the term [seo faq] without even providing one.

“SEO is dead”

Did you know? SEO is dead! Yeah, it has been dead almost since its inception and every time it was pronounced dead again to get many many links from SEO specialists and those who hate SEO. It works with other disciplines as well. I do not like this type of link bait, but it works again and again.

Forum and community participation

On most forums you get a link on the profile, in the signature, and of course in posts. Also, once people know you they’ll keep on linking to you of their own accord. Google considers forums and communities to be quite important. They are even in the menu on search results pages under “discussions”.

I’m not sure about the actual link value for Google, but I’ve seen forums drive traffic quite a few times and bring you dedicated visitors who will return. Thus participation is key. Only getting profile links by the dozens doesn’t work these days IMHO.

Answering questions

Yahoo Answers is a bad resource for answers but a great resource for questions. Also, forums are full of questions people ask. In many cases you just need to provide a resource on your site and people will gladly link to it. You can even link to it yourself and people will be thankful.

Humour and cartoons

Do you know The Oatmeal? You don’t? Well you have probably slept the last few years. Matthew Inman, formerly a renowned SEO expert, has been so successful with his humorous cartoons that he stopped doing SEO altogether and now focuses on the linkbait itself.

Blogging

Consider Laughing Squid, one of the most popular blogs out there. It’s actually run by a web hosting company of the same name. I’ve checked the keywords they optimise for and they seem to rank quite well just by blogging about cool stuff. How do they do it? They check out what’s popular elsewhere and blog about it themselves just a few hours later, so that many people discover it there and link back to them as the source of the great find.

Donations

Open source software and charities are so grateful that you donate to support them or their cause that in many cases they will link back to you to show their gratitude. This is still a legit way to get links.

Event sponsorships

Recently I pointed out that German blogging conference re:publica is selling links to its “sponsors” without using the obligatory “nofollow” attribute Google requires for such cases. Heck, they even linked to Google as one of their main sponsors. So it seems that event sponsorships do not count as paid links.

Linking out

Many people in the SEO industry still don’t believe this but actually linking out to others, especially bloggers covering the same subject matter and your peers who’ll notice it, is one of the best ways to get actual links to your site. This works in multiple ways, the simplest one being that people will check out who links to them and maybe discover something worth being linked to on your site as well.

Fix other people’s broken links

The Web deteriorates fast. Web pages or whole websites disappear, documents move or vanish. Most sites and blogs do not even notice or care. They don’t even know they should and how they could check for broken links. You can. Just contact the bloggers and webmasters and suggest a resource from your site as a substitute.

Web statistics

Looking at some of the most linked websites out there, you’ll notice the likes of Statcounter and Piwik. Piwik doesn’t even require you to link back to them, but they already have PageRank 10 due to all the links they’ve got. So providing a free web statistic tool seems to be one of the most successful link building strategies ever. This is, of course, not something everybody can do, but it’s certainly cheaper than spending the millions the actual links are worth. I’ve personally witnessed more than one analytics tool go out of business lately, so they must be cheap to acquire. I’d buy the now defunct 103bees search analytics tool if I could afford it.

Strategic partnerships

These days there are numerous services you could offer, but in most cases you won’t be able to provide all of them unless you have a huge team of at least dozens of people with different skillsets. The solution is to join forces with fellow freelancers or small business owners. Am SEO agency, for example, could partner with a web design or web hosting provider. Guess what, you could link to each other as well. Just ask the business owners you already cooperate with if they are interested in a more close business relationship.

Unfortunately these 30 link building/link baiting techniques are not the only ones that still seem to work in 2011. So-called paid links do as well. I do not recommend engaging in buying links, but so many others do that you might end up below them in the search results if you don’t. In this case, you may want at least to mimic the way paid links work.

* Image by Hugo Cardoso.

Link Building: Link Context and Anchor Text Optimisation

Tad Chef — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:37:57 +0000

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.

Examples of such devalued links are:

Reciprocal links
Footer links
Site-wide links
Off-topic links
Exact match anchor text links.

None of these tactics is by itself ”evil”. It’s just their overuse that leads to penalties. Indeed I was reviewing one of my favorite SEO companies to find all of these techniques used in a fairly legitimate way and indeed combined. Let me explain:

Reciprocal links: This SEO company linked to its clients in their case studies and the clients linked back to them.

Footer links: The client sites were linking to them in their footers as it was “who built the site” info nobody expected to see in the content itself.

Site-wide links: Because the footer was added to every single page on the site, the footer links were site-wide, adding up to dozens, hundreds or even thousands

Off-topic links: A fashion or car website linking to a web design and SEO agency is not really a relevant context.

Exact match anchor text links: As the company has built the clients’ sites as a whole, most of the clients had a typical “web design by x” link added where web design was the actual anchor text.

So you see all these techniques by themselves are quite natural; many websites link their web designers like this. Combined, these links look very artificial though. Spammy paid links look very similar in many cases.

Let us return for a while to the concept of a healthy natural link profile. You do not want just each link to be of SEO benefit. You also want to have a healthy natural link profile as a whole. Such a profile is including nofollow and scraper links. An abnormal link profile raises a red flag for the Google algo.

You might get penalised for perceived paid or low quality links without even having them. Depending on the industry, niche or even language of your site, a healthy link profile might look different. So it does not make sense to create another faulty ”keyword density” that allows you to find the perfect numbers for each one link type.

One again it’s common sense that will guide you through the link context and anchor text optimisation. Let me show you the advice I had for this particular colleague of mine:

Add context

Write a post or at least a short paragraph about yourself, or let your clients introduce you on their blog or site. Do not just add the link. Introduce the site you are linking to.

Add branding

Do not only link the generic text as in ”web design”. Link to ”web design by x” or ”thank you to our web designers from x”. Insert your brand for x.

Make it readable

Do not hide the link and its context in the footer or somewhere where nobody will read it. Let them proclaim it right there where we can see and read it. After all, they like your services, don’t they?

Less is more

Linking to you on 2000 pages does not make sense in many cases. One laser targeted page may bring even more leads. Search engines like Google can count links of course, and group them together so that 2000 links from one site is not much better than just one or two.

Treat each link as an individual

Do not use a template or require your link partners always to link in a certain manner. Ask them to include your brand and services, and let them do it themselves or suggest a way that’s appropriate for each site.

Now you could argue that all these link optimisation techniques work only when you actually engage in artificial link building by contacting other webmasters. You can apply the same rules to link bait as well. People are lazy, especially on the Web, so that they share and link in a quick and dirty way.

The title, headline and first sentence or paragraph of the linked-to page will often be the text used to link to you.

Also, typical linkbait techniques like badges, widgets, infographics or downloads can by their very nature be only displayed in certain places and contexts.

Thus you can influence the outcome of your link baiting efforts by creating a badge that is small enough to fit in the sidebar but big enough not to be placed in the footer. Infographics often include an embed code. You could even run a script that randomly chooses one from several anchor text options.

Aside from the technical aspects, Google displays a tendency of trusting brands more and more over the years, so that focusing on generic keyword rich anchor texts is probably the most widely overused SEO techniques nowadays. It might still work; even the other outdated SEO practices mentioned above have all worked in the past. It’s far easier to influence a link when it is put up on a page than trying to fix it afterwards.

Also, don’t change everything at once when fixing your links and anchor texts and adapting to a newer algorithm. It’s pretty certain that link history and stability is taken into account as well, so that links that appear and disappear potentially raise another red flag. Your natural link profile does not change overnight. It grows and withers organically. Don’t hurry when applying changes. Otherwise you might look like a spammer to the indifferent bots.

* Image by Oceanik.

The Hidden Motives for Denouncing SEO

Tad Chef — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:04:11 +0000

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.

Depending on the hidden motives the approach varies. I don’t want to explain the absurdity of denouncing SEO anymore, I’ll just repeat my short answer: saying “SEO is spam, dead or has no future” is like saying web hosting, web design or usability is spam, dead or has no future. As long as there is an Internet you will need a way to put content online (web hosting) design it (web design), to make it findable (SEO) and user friendly (usability).

So assuming the sanity of the “SEO is spam”, “SEO is dead” or “has no future” proponents we have the following motives:

Trying to convince your competition not to optimise in your market to gain an advantage

“SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups” by Chris Dixon co-founder of Hunch and investor in a 12 of others startups is a great example of this. Hunch is a pretty useless content farm that actually has little or no content. It optimises for lots of generic phrases with almost empty pages. For example the page optimised for ”Ways to Save Money”, which uses the exact match keyphrase in the title, URL and H1 tag only contains a 12 links to other empty pages with ”ideas” like ”Cook at home”.

The actual phrase is the only ”content” on that page. There are comments and more links on it. A blog could summarise all the “ways to save money” in a single post but here they are spread on dozens of pages. Luckily the Hunch content-less farm doesn’t rank anywhere near the top for this query.

So Chris Dixon tries to denounce his luckier competition, the content farms, which ironically are really valuable in contrast to his own set of keyword optimised empty pages. He says things like: ”Some of the SEO industry is “white hat,” which generally means consultants giving benign advice for making websites search-engine friendly. But there is also a huge industry of black-hat SEO consultants who trade and sell links, along with companies like content farms that promote their own low-quality content through aggressive SEO tactics.”

Indeed he targets his direct competition here. He can’t compete with the content farms for obvious reasons so he tries to at least limit the number of competitors by advising not to follow his own business model.

Getting the attention of Google engineers in order to get competitors downranked

Do you remember the early wave of content farms are bad articles? Almost all of them focused on one example, Demand Media. The one site most often cited as the prototypical content fam was Demand Media’s eHow. The bad publicity for Google allowing content farms to rank high became so wide spread that Google had to act quickly. They have worked on a low quality content update for a while but it went live recently to counter the impression that Google results increasingly deteriorate.

The big surprise was that eHow didn’t get penalized It didn’t even lose in rankings, it actually gained in the Google index according to more than one SEO statistic provider. So while almost all other content farms lost significantly in the update eHow actually gained visibility in Google search.

Demand Media was aggressively dealing with the menace of a Google penalty beforehand. The PR efforts have worked out. While Google has destroyed most of its competition, Demand Media itself, the content farm that started is now more than ever a dominating force in the content farm business.

Stack Exchange CEO Joel Spolsky tries the same approach and anti-SEO tech blog TechCrunch is glad to assist in the following post: ”(Founder Stories) Stack Exchange’s Joel Spolsky On How SEO Makes The Internet Worse”.

Stack Overflow by Stack Exchange is a Quora-like Q&A site focusing on the programming industry. The above mentioned Chris Dixon is also an investor. Stack Overflow does not create any value itself, it’s 100% user generated content. It’s basically a mix of forums and a social voting site. Mr. Spolsky’s main complaint is that:

“SEO spam sites just rip the questions and answers straight off the site, wrap them with some black-hat SEO magic and Google ads, and rank higher than the original page on Stack Overflow. ‘They took our content, put Google ads on it, and made it worse because not in situ,’ … ‘They used SEO techniques to rank higher.’”

So while he seemingly addresses the common issue of content theft on the Internet he ultimately wants to save his business model of earning money by content provided by others. He takes ”his” content from users who earn no money for posting it and he wants to be the only one to own it. There’s a bigger issue involved here, who owns the content you put on a site, you or the site you post in on? I’d argue you do that but here someone who capitalizes on content by other people complains about others taking advantage of it.

Also let’s look at a random example question I took from Stack Overflow to show how low quality user generated content outranks expert bloggers. I used the question ”Change an input’s HTML5 placeholder color with CSS” from Stack Overflow for this purpose. The two short answers only offer a very basic workaround for the actual issue while there are advanced scripts available online to deal with it.

Nonetheless when you search for [input HTML5 placeholder CSS] stack Overflows outranks the actual HTML5 placeholder CSS styling expert solutions by Nico Hagenburger and David Walsh. Why does Google favor such thin content UGC sites? Is it due to the fact startup CEOs and Google engineers are like buddies and can influence them to get competitors downranked ”algorithimically” while simple bloggers have no such advantages? Stack Overflow is no different than all the other UGC based content farms, it’s just more geeky.

Making the impression that SEO is not your business model in order to make sure Google doesn’t act on you

Ariana Huffington is probably one of the most hated competitors in journalist circles. Journalists and old media publishing houses who in most cases fail at SEO are very envious at her meteoric rise to money and fame. How did she get there? To a large part due to SEO best practices and user generated content. By now the Huffington posts even ranks with empty pages scraping third party tweets.

So she should be praising SEO for what it’s worth, after all, it was not just the exploitation um huge numbers of idealist and activist contributors, it was a well planned SEO strategy that made the Huffington Post succeed. Now that everybody noticed though Ariana Huffingtom tells the envious professional journalists that it’s actually not about SEO. Her opinion on SEO is already in the headline of an interview piece called ”Arianna Huffington: SEO Is Just A Tool, Not A Way To Produce Great Journalism [TCTV]” on the same TechCrunch blog which is renowned for badmouthing SEO.

Then she goes on to claim how the new AOL-HuffPo will be focusing on high quality journalism. She even goes so far as to claim that she already focused before the merger on high quality journalism. She did not. The HuffPo empire was build on unpaid labour by thousands of activist bloggers most of whom feel cheated now. Many contributors left immediately and publicly decried the the sale to AOL as a sell out.

HuffPo was basically a huge group blog run by idealists for free. They created value and one person now became a millionaire by selling it to a megacorporation that doesn’t fit with the idealist worldview of most contributors.

So what is the business model of HuffPo? It’s taking free content from unpaid contributors, pushing it to search engines via SEO and making money off it. All the journalism is good and SEO is bad talk is just a way to cover up her tracks. She ceated a huge content farm by fooling people into unpaid work by pretending that it’s an activist site. No that’s clear it isn’t the HuffPost team is getting desperate and thus uses Mahalo-like spam technique like scraping tweets. As people in the search industry already notice she has to blow the trumpet of journalism in order not get penalized like the other content farms.

So you see that in all three cases the hidden motives for denouncing are quite obvious when you look a bit more closer.

It’s not that these people want to see a clean, valuable and relevant content on search engines. It’s their own business they have in mind. The spam they talk about are ”sites positioned above me”. They want to use publicity to press Google to act on their competitors. Demand Media already succeeded using this tactic it seems so more an dmore shady individuals will do try it. Prepare for advanced variation of “seo is spam”, “seo is dead” and “seo has no future” articles.

* Image by Toni Blay

Stop Comparing Social Media to SEO to Denounce One of Them

Tad Chef — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:47:47 +0000

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.

On the Web you need both search and social media combined to move forward in 2010. While it’s important to separate the two and to know how to deal with each one of them it’s crucial to always remember that they are both part of the bigger picture. Also even the search engines and social sites themselves combine both search and social media these days. Facebook and Twitter for example both focus on search as well and Google attempts to enter social media again and again with multiple tools. So there is no either or when it comes to SEO and social media.

Knowing that search and social media is one changes your whole Web strategy significantly.

You will probably bring together the two teams working on SEO and social media together to connect both sides of the equation. The results are obvious, your business will flourish. It doesn’t make sense to create content for social media and to market it when you don’t add some keywords you target. Social media traffic and attention last only for a short time frame but search will bring users in the long term.

Also it doesn’t make sense to create content solely geared towards the search engines spiders or even users. It’s not 2005 anymore and repetitive barely readable titles and headlines don’t work anymore. You may be lucky and they still work in your niche but soon enough you will wake up to high bounce rates and low conversion rates. Your sales will plummet.

So you need to stop comparing or juxtaposing SEO and social media to succeed. You have to combine both.

For almost two years I have been practicing a very radical approach of SEO 2.0 – I wanted to prove that in a Web 2.0 environment social media SEO is enough. I wanted to show the proof of concept that you don’t need Google anymore. It hasn’t worked out in the long run. I almost did it but it wasn’t sustainable. Still, the combined SEO 2.0 approach, good old SEO best practices and social media participation, outreach, optimization, marketing and strategy really work best.

As I’m a one man army it’s no a problem to take the two and get what I want. Your company or your third party service providers my struggle with it. There is no way to do either or though. Focusing solely on Facebook and Twitter or Google is a recipe for disaster. People search for and find your business using both social media and search engines and via other methods as well (yellow pages, local and niche directories e.g.).

SEO is not the same as social media marketing but there is no gain in artificially choosing one over the the other.

Whenever someone tries to convince that either SEO is better than social media or the other way around ask the person whether s/he prefers the engine or the wheels in a car.

Comparing SEO and social media optimization or search and social media can make sense once you decide to promote a business online. The purpose of such a comparison is not to decide whether you use one or the other but what tactics yu will use on each. Also what will come first? Last but not least you have to be able to plan resources and investments.

Denouncing either SEO or SMO does only make sense as a linkbait strategy to succeed on both social media and search.

* Image by Dodge Challenger1.

How To Use Infographics for SEO & Linkbait

Tad Chef — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:22:29 +0000

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.

A viral marketer determines the topic of the infographic.
An SEO specialist will find out the keywords you want to target.
A journalist or statistician has to to research the data needed to display.
A graphic designer has to actually make the infographic.
A social media marketer is needed who pushes it out to social media and influencers.

Of course one person can perform several of these tasks maybe even do all of it in some cases but usually more then one person will be involved. Thus a blogger can’t really cover all of these steps. There are some blog posts out there introducing parts of the process. I’ve collected them and compiled a list of a dozen resources showing you how to use infographics for SEO and linkbait. Scroll down to check it out.

As you see below roughly half of these posts deal with the circumstances of publishing an infographic and actual examples or case studies. The other half are tutorials that explain different ways of actually creating the infographic itself.

Where do you start? The idea is the most important part. You can’t take any random data set, create an infographic and expect people to share it all over the place. An infographic has to strike a chord with many people without being the lowest common denominator. It really has to contain some info. You can’t just focus on trivia like celebrities.

Also infographics work best for huge numbers or complex processes nobody can really fathom. A great example is the BP oil catastrophe which by far extended the term spill from day one but people couldn’t really imagine the sheer size and the dire consequences of it. The BP oil spill thus spawned a huge number of infographics to illustrate the disaster.

While the term infographic also entail the “graphic” it doesn’t have to a fancy graphic. Often a combination of maps, diagrams and a few images reduced to their symbolic character are enough.

The starting point for a successful infographic one it is ready is still often Digg, the almost dead social news site. While Facebook, Twitter and even Tumblr have by now much more overall traffic and influence than Digg, the Digg frontpage can make the infographic succeed elsewhere.

Of course many bloggers, especially the less important ones who lack the ability to create killer content themselves love to include infographics in their blogs. It’s a good idea to contact some bloggers directly and send them the infographic. Of course you have to research bloggers who really care for the topic you illustrate.

On the other hand you need to display the infographic on your site or blog to get the credit and links in the first place. So you have to make sure that you are the first to publish it and that a predefined embed code includes your site as the source. Don’t forget to add the source at the bottom of the graphic itself as well.

12 infographic resources:

5 Ridiculous SEO Myths Spread in 2010 by Web Designers, Bloggers and Journalists

Tad Chef — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:57:56 +0000

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.

Another reason to speak up on these SEO myths is that most of them get wildly popular on Twitter. The examples below have garnered hundreds of retweets during the last two weeks.

1. Meta keywords matter for SEO via Mens News Daily

They don’t. SEO practicioners have been saying this for years and Google itself as well as as other search engines have confirmed: Meta keywords are dead as a SEO tactic. Even the meta description does not actually help you to rank better it can only make people click your your result.

2. You need to “submit your site to social bookmarking sites“ (like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon) via 1stWebdesigner and Helium

First off you don’t submit to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is guess what, about bookmarking! So you actually bookmark a site or rather a page as is more often the case. I use Delicious every day for that purpose like most other people. You can encourage people to bookmark you by different means but submitting your site like it’s a directory or something is SPAM.

Then Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon are not bookmarking at all. The 1stWebdesigner author doesn’t even mention Delicious. Digg and Reddit are social news and StumbleUpon is social browsing/social discovery. On all of these sites ”submission of sites” for SEO reasons is frowned upon and that’s certainly not the way SEO works there. SEO on Digg means a clever linkbait headline or striking infographic. Digg ignores such submissions but on Reddit and StumbleUpon you get downright banned for “submitting s” as if it was a directory.

3. SEO is only about “top positions” via Webdesignerdepot

I didn’t know whether I should cry or laugh. Another hugely popular web design blog offers a whole post of bogus SEO advice o rather anti-SEO myths. The post starts with the false assumption that SEO is only about top positions and that SEO companies only care for those. How wrong can you get? Most reputable SEO agencies preach usability, conversions and ROI for years, including SEOptimise. Just stop lying pal. I don’t even believe you can be that wrong without lying on purpose. Show me SEO companies that only care top position and I show you those living in the past.

4. “SEO is evil” via Business Insider

Wow. Here you have an article by one of the brightest minds i the SEO industry and what does the editor do? S/he apparently changes the headline in order to capitalize on the anti-SEO prejudice wide spread on the Web. SEO is evil? Why then does Google itself publish SEO advice regularly? Please read the Google SEO starter guide [PDF link] first before even considering to meddle with legitimate SEO articles. Also reread the original headline of the post you completely reverted the meaning of: Why Journalists Need To Stop Resenting SEO.

5. Local SEO is not SEO via Worcester Business Journal

This one is ridiculous. This journalist claims that you can rank without SEO by using local SEO. As she apparently doesn’t even know that local SEO exists she denounces SEO altogether. Awful ignorance, just awful. You can get your Google Places listing without an SEO professional but to actually rank with it you need a lot specialized local SEO tactics. Enough said.

You surely wonder why I don’t link to the above mentioned articles. It’s becacuse every link counts as a vote for Google and any publicity. In case you know these publications I advise you to stop reading them as they spread lies, myths and misconceptions that will cost you money!

Also don’t spread such stories on Twitter. You’re just showing how clueless you are when it comes to SEO.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 5 Ridiculous SEO Myths Spread in 2010 by Web Designers, Bloggers and Journalists

How to Write Highly Popular 30+ Item List Blog Posts to Get Links and Traffic

Tad Chef — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:57:19 +0000

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.

In the web design/web development niche even more people publish lists like that all the time.

Why 30?

For some reason 30+ lists are better suited for the Web than top 10, 20 or wahtever lists. I have a few ideas why that is the case but these ideas are just speculation. What I do know for sure is that the so called task ROI of most 30+ lists is higher than the top 10, whatever or top 100 lists.

One crucial success factor is that people tend to think in dozens not necessarily tens IMHO.

The decimal system makes us read and write top 10, top 20 or top 100 lists but the more “natural” way to count is by using dozens as in twelve hours. That’s why a number like 36 sounds better to many of us. Even though 30 is two and a half dozens this number just seems to entice people to read.

Also most people are tired of top 10 and 20 lists, they have been overused. Here again 30+ sounds more natural.

Last but not least you simply can’t compile a list of 100 items without broadening the topic or lowering the quality of the list.

Most lists are comprehensive enough with around 30 items.

More items would often be redundant or less relevant. A top 10 list also implies a personal selection of some kind. You have to choose “the best” 10 while 30 items cover a subject in depth.

That’s why I sometimes even reduce the number of items in a list, at least in the headline. One of my favorite lists has been the one about advanced SEO which contained 55+ links but only around 30 items officially.

Delicious

I collect great posts from SEO blogs in my Delicious account onreact.com and I tag them according to a set of rules. I add mostly tags I’ve used in the past to categorize these posting in relevant groups.

Then from time to time I take a look at some of the tags and those that contain more than 10 or 20 items get my attention. Sometimes they are almost thirty already so I just have to copy and paste the links. I delete the unworthy ones and add some from outside my Delicious bookmarks but the bulk of the work has been done while reading social media, search and SEO news in the morning each day.

Sometimes I have to combine several tags into one trend. The brutal thruths about Google, SEO etc. have been such a list. It was clear to me that there was a trend in the industry to write about the less glamorous parts of the SEO game but I couldn’t name it. Then the inspiration came out of nowhere and I have found the common ground to add it up to a list.

In some cases I don’t use Delicious at all. I simply get inspired and write down approx. 30 items from the top of my head.

Twitter

From time to time I use Twitter to crowdsource list items. The SEO FAQ list heavily relied on input from my Twitter followers. Also the black hat SEO techniques list has grown with a little help of my friends.

You have to ask the right questions and offer incentives though. The SEO FAQ offered both backlinks and content for those who took part. I asked my Twitter followers about the black hat SEO techniques their arch enemies use. Otherwise people would probably mostly stay low key.

Link list or item list?

A simple link list is not the best kind of list. Sometimes I just have to compile a list of resources and link them beacuse there are so many of them. Such a list can overwhelm though. Many people like lists because they want to have a quick overview about a subject, not a huge reading list. Therefore a combined text item list with added links for further reading is the best option. This way you get both kinds of list readers, the save for later bunch as well as the quick overview group.

A simple link list will not be as popular as an item list with added links to prove the points. Still both list formats are highly popular. A 30+ list post done in 4h will get more traction on the Web than a tutorial that took 6 or 8h to write.

Linking out

Another key factor leading to the overwhelming success of my lists posts in general is the massive amount of outbound links. While many SEOs are still stuck in the past and attempt to hoard PageRank and trap users like the news media do I rely on linking out for SEO reasons.

We already know that Google prefers sites that link out

(after all they need outgoing links to determine their PageRank algo) but have no proof yet that they affect rankings directly.

What’s obvious though is that people who you are linking to will link back to you, spread the word on social media and support your blog or even business in the future.

So at the end of the day the fact that I link out to dozens of other blogs get me traffic and links in significant numbers.

Contrary to popular wisdom SEOptimise has improved in rankings in recent years ever since we link out in large numbers. SEOptimise ranks in the top 10 for some of the most competitive search marketing terms while being a relatively small agency compared to the competition.

Also the lists themselves tend to rank quite well. SEOptimise ranks top 3 for [advanced SEO], [SEO techniques] or [social media statistics].

The secret is our broad, organic backlink structure build up by business blogging utilizing these highly popular 30+ items list posts.

30 SEO, Social Media & Marketing Case Studies that Prove the ROI of it All

Tad Chef — Fri, 07 May 2010 12:34:39 +0000

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:

Link building/baiting

Other SEO

Social Media

Blogging

Other

It took me more than a year to collect those case studies so they are only those that I really think are worth your attention. Most of them are not overt advertising or blatant self promotion, they are quite neutral case studies you can rely on.

Take note that I included more than one (actually three) articles about two particularly successful marketing campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. The results were to good to not get covered in depth.

Of course we at SEOptimise have our own SEO case studies. You can download them here and here as PDF documents.

Steal this SEO FAQ: 30+ SEO Questions You Always Wanted an Answer to

Tad Chef — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:30:00 +0000

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.

I want to see 10 or more real SEO FAQs to outrank this crap. So feel free to copy the questions I’ve compiled with the help of some SEO practicionares from all over the Web and to provide your own answers. I will link your answers in this post as well. So steal this SEO FAQ: 30+ SEO questions you always wanted an answer to.

Some of the Q&As might sound funny, especially the original tweets they’re based on. We had a lot of fun while collecting the questions and answers.

What does SEO stand for? The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization but by now it’s not only about search and engines anymore. See 2.
What is SEO? To define SEO is not an easy task as it’s changing all the time. In 2010 the SEO definition might sound something like this: Everything done to ensure getting found on the Internet and to make sure that the ensuing traffic converts.
Is SEO spam, bullshit, dead etc.? Who knows. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, BBC etc. certainly don’t think so. They practice SEO like most of other website owners. Last time I checked all the people who blame SEO for global warming, the Iraq war, the global economic crisis have optimized their websites according to SEO techniques. By the numbers SEO is booming all the time for several years a in a row.
Why aren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? You haven’t done SEO yet? You have no content? Your site consists mainly of Flash, AJAX or simply graphics? You have asked Jason Calacanis or Derek Powazek for SEO advice? Also you most probably rank for long tail queries already. Question by @rishil and @peteyoung – Answer by @IngoGuava
Why am I on #1 all the time but when my wife searches for me she doesn’t find me? Maybe you need a divorce? No, just kidding. You probably need to disable personalized search. Otherwise Google will serve you the results you most desire.
When will we see results? It will take a while depending on what results you expect what for. Some keywords might even take a year or more while others may work after weeks or months. Perform a thorough keyword and market research first to know. Also SEO is basically a continuous process that never stops. Question by @IngoGuava, @tonyboney and @DolphinPromo – Answer by @IngoGuava
Can we rank for iPhones? Do you sell iPhones? Are you a representative of Apple? Do you sell iPhones globally or just nation-wide? Do you want to spend 50k+$ on SEO monthly? Then maybe yes. Question by @rhyswynne – Answer by @rhyswynne
Can we rank for everything (huge list of keywords)? If you are Jeff Bezos and your site is Amazon you probably can. In all other cases you have to choose and set preferences. You have to determine your main keywords, a few of them, and go after them. Your main keywords are the most popular and profitable ones. A hotel in London would go after hotel london probably and similar combinations. Question by @maxyRo
How much does SEO cost? How much does a car cost, or a house? First we need to know what kind of car or house you need then we can try to assess the price. Otherwise we can just say somewhere in between 1k and 1 million dollars per month. Everything below 1k is low quality and/or automated. Question by @seowolf
Why is SEO so expensive? Why are cars and houses so expensive? Because it takes lots of time, resources and work to build them. Besides SEO makes your website actually earn money while setting up website and designing it by itself does not. So at the end of the day SEO earns more money that it takes. Also remember that SEO is not just like a house or car. It’s more like a shop or a hotel when it comes to the house metaphor and it’s more like a race car when it comes to the car metaphor.
How long does it take to get indexed by Google? Google needs minutes to weeks depending on your site to index it or new content appearing on it. Without SEO it might even take forever.
How to submit my new site to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.? You don’t submit sites to search engines these days. You link to them from already indexed sites, you ping them via blog posts and or you submit an XML sitemap.
How do I submit to 1000 search engines? Only idiots do. There are only a handful of search engines that you need at all. Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask in the US. Mostly Google in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
Do I need an XML sitemap? Depending on your site you may or may not need one.
Do I need meta tags for SEO? No, the meta description tag is good for search users though who might decide whther they click on yours based on the description you offer.
Do I need a high PageRank for SEO? You need internal Pagerank for your site to get indexed. Toolbar PageRank (the green bar in your Google toolbar) is not a prerequisite.
What is linkbait? There are at least two common definitions of linkbait (or link bait). One negative and one positive. The negative one says that it’s luring people to link to you for a reason they normally wouldn’t. The positive one explains that linkbait is a highly linkable masterfully crafted peace of content people not only like but also recommend to others by linking.
Can’t my niece who is a graphic designer do the SEO? She probably can cook as well but you probably would go to a restaurant nonetheless. Designers in most case underestimate the importance of SEO and misunderstand it. They assume that the designer should be decide how a website should be build and when the site is done, they, or rather their clients realize that they’re not even indexed by Google. SEO should be part of website design not just a add on. An open minded designer can provide a good findable site architecture that works for SEO as well. S/he in most cases needs an SEO expert to accomplish that task.
Can’t my nephew who is a web developer do the SEO? Many old school SEO professionals have started out as web developers. Nonetheless they had to focus on other non-technical SEO techniques. A good web developer can provide roughly one third of the skills you need for SEO. Sadly most web developers are clueless about SEO beyond the most common basics.
Can my son-in-law who is a Perl, Java and C programmer do my SEO? Programmers often underestimate the difficulty of SEO and attempt to to attain rankings by creating scripts that automatically enhance websites. This is a very risky business as it often crosses the thin line of waht’s allowed by teh search engine guidelines.
Why should I outsource my SEO? SEO is a full time job for a person or requires a whole team with several skills ranging from web development, content creation to marketing. Unless you have at least one experienced full time SEO inhouse it is strongly advised to seek assistance from a SEO compnay or consultant. Question by @seowolf
Can’t I just use WordPress plus plugins for SEO? You can but it’s not enough. Nowadays most modern CMS and blog software has built in technical SEO capabilities. To outrank others who use mostly SEO friendly software as well you have to stick out.
Does Google hate SEO? No, Google even offers SEO advice and a plethora of SEO tools itself. It’s an ages old myth that Google fight SEOs. In fact the Google employees and SEO practitioners speak at the same conferences and work together as business partners. Most SEO companies are big clients of Google as they also buy PPC ads from Google.
Does SEO mean optimization for search engines spiders not humans? Some people still assume that SEO is used to please search bots only. Most reputable SEO experts advocate search engine optimization for users.
Is buying links, hidden text, IP delivery etc. black hat SEO? Some techniques considered by many a s SEO are also considered black hat. Still most them can be used ethically as well so only the context can tell you when a particular measure is black or white hat.
Is black hat SEO legal? The question to ask should rather be whether black hat SEO is recommended. No it is not. Most of it is probably still legal, depending on the technique. It pays only for the few who do it on large scale.
Does site size matter? Historically it did matter. For a period of time bigger sites by the sheer number of pages seemed to rank batter. By now the pros and cons outweigh each other – so it does not makes sense to inflate the size of a website artificially by adding low quality content.
Do domain extensions (top level domains like .com, co.uk) matter? Yes they do. Especially when it comes to country based domains like .fr, .de or .es – for local results in respective countries you should use preferably a country domain to get a small advantage. Also many in the SEO industry assume that .edu and .gov domains are trusted more by Google. Google itself has denied that explaining that .edu and .gov domains get more links and thus Google trusts them more. Question by @Ramkarthik
Do nofollow links count? Indeed it has long been known that Yahoo doesn’t discount nofollow links completely. It also seems that Google makes exceptions as well. Plus remember that the main function of a link is to bring visitors. The search engine “juice ” is just a side-effect so a link is a link no matter the attribute. Question by @amabaie – Answer by @amabaie here.
Do you offer PageRank optimization, search engine submission, meta tag optimization? You should try some time travel back to the dark past of early SEO. These things are secondary or negligible.
Is blog commenting for SEO spam? Like in many other cases, it depends dear london real estate! Try changing your name to some real name and add something of value to the conversation and your comment will be very welcome.
I have a question or answer that is not on this FAQ what can I do? There is a comment section! Add your questions and/or answers there. They might get added to the actual FAQ.

OK, now steal this SEO FAQ and provide your own answers. Make sure not to copy both as in this case this would be a case of duplicate content and most likely lead to at least the copy losing ground in the search results.

Also make sure to read this post by Rishi Lakhani where he answers a lot of questions you might encounter in future.

Update: Thanks everybody for taking part in the SEO FAQ meme and providing your often excellent answers:

30+ SEO Questions You Always Wanted an Answer to by buynary (offline by now)
SEO Questions and Answers Worth Stealing by SEO Web Help
SEO FAQ by SEOForums.org
SEO Tips – Your Search Engine Optimization Questions Answered by SubHub
SEO FAQ by Jeroen van Eck [in Dutch]
32 SEO Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and Answers by Shannon Steffen
SEO FAQ – Answers to your SEO questions by David Leonhardt

http://www.sksdesigns.com/2010/02/32-seo-frequently-asked-questions-faq-and-answers/

VodafoneUK NOT to Hunt Beavers!

Tad Chef — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:16:16 +0000

Image: Happy Beaver by stevehdc.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Yesterday many people on Twitter cried out in outrage about a misled tweet from @vodafoneuk – in it some apparently tweeting under the influence employee made a badly spelled comment about the hygiene of homosexuals.

Then the person also threatened to hunt for beavers!

This is indeed outrageous! As you probably know beavers are an endangered species and have been extinct a few years ago in the UK. Hunting them just to vent your anger is the last thing to do.

This would have been the end of the story as @vodafoneUK clearly stated that it was a breach of conduct. They will NOT hunt beavers. Sadly someone responsible for the renowned UK technology site Tecchuff made the same remarks twice on Twitter since then. Shame on you!

Do we have to witness a wide spread wave of anti-beaver misconduct in the British technology sector?

Also the British press widely reported the incident citing the tweet to make sure everybody who missed the anti-beaver message could read it.

In the meantime @VodafoneUK got additional 500+ followers in the recent days. According the Google Cache they had 8,500 of February, 2nd. During the “breach” they had 8,663. So it seems the good old saying “any publicity is good publicity” also applies here. Now they have approx. 9,050 followers.

There is even the possibility that this was a publicity stunt to get attention.

They may have “pulled a Calacanis” on purpose. They’ve got their brand mentioned all over the web and on several major British publications. Many of them linked to their Twitter account.

Even in the case it was a true blunder we’ve seen that such misconduct pays off.

Nobody seems to be really angry, not even the homosexuals. They probably don’t regard themselves as dirty while they are glad that VodafoneUK has outed itself as being at least bisexual. Still, animal cruelty is unacceptable. Where is PETA when you need them?

Stop the beaver hunt now!

Poor beaver! Our colleagues from SiteVisibility are outraged as well. In case this was done on purpose @VodafoneUK is really bad at being funny though. They should try some good old classy British humor.

30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically

Tad Chef — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:33:03 +0000

Wicked by xlorddashx.

Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.

The good news is: Most black hat SEO techniques can be used in a clean, ethical white hat way as well.

They are like knives: You can slice bread with a knife but you can kill with it as well. It’s your decision how you use the knife. Also consider the problem with overall perception of the SEO industry. Your hat can be whiter than snow and still people will treat you as the guy with the virtual knife.

Personally I think black hat SEO is for the weak.

The black hat logic goes: When you can’t win the game you have to cheat. It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.

OK, long story short, here are the 30 black hat techniques you can use ethically as well. Take note how I am explaining only the positive way of using each technique. I do not advocate the use of it in it’s original black hat context. Use these knives as kitchen knives:

black hat by googlisti

Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.
Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

booze by tz1_1zt

Thanks to my Twitter followers @DerekEdmond, @seowolf and @DonnaFontenot for brain storming support on this list. The question I asked was:

What was the most evil black hat SEO technique your dirty, stinking competitors have worked with?

Why don’t you, the SEOptimise readers, answer this question as well? Otherwise just use these 30 black hat techniques ethically or try the many more white hat tactics first.

The 12 Days of Christmas – SEO Agency Edition

Kevin Gibbons — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:55:47 +0000

Christmas isn’t Christmas without someone butchering a much-loved song to make a marketing point and this year it’s our turn. Brace yourselves for the SEOptimise Twelve Days of Christmas Special…

Image credit: krisdecurtis

On the first day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me, one golden rule

SEO is an ongoing effort

On the second day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me two social media musts

Be personable
Never pitch in an online social situation

On the third day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me three web copy writing rules

Remember humans read your copy as well as search engines
Link out to information that adds authority to your opinions
Your words represent the company, so be eloquent, intelligent and accurate

On the fourth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me four Twitter tips

Discuss and debate, don’t just lecture
Let your personality show, Twitter isn’t the board room
Monitor mentions of your company and respond to them
Respond to relevant questions

On the fifth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me five golden SEO rules

Be unique – use original copy on your site
Stay onside with Google – black hat tactics risk penalisation
Aim to build links from relevant, authoritative websites
Rewrite your site – if your website hasn’t been written with Google in mind, redo it
Use internal links throughout your site, with relevant anchor text

On the sixth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me six tips for building your brand

Tweet regularly and often
Keep an up-to-date blog
Offer guest posts
Use social media platforms
Attend industry conferences
Socialise in industry-specific social sites & forums

On the seventh day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me seven hints for press releases

Make the news angle obvious
Target appropriate journalists with the release
Follow up the email with a phone call
Release responses to relevant industry events
Don’t let quality standards slip – use a spell check
Link to your own pages using relevant anchor text
Make it as easy as possible for the (overworked) journalist

On the eighth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me eight email marketing rules:

Don’t bombard customers
Keep your content relevant
Make your copy sparkle
Use intriguing subject lines
Review your emails in different browsers to check they look right
Send the message at an appropriate time
Test messages on a small group first
Respect your recipient at all times

On the ninth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me nine linkbait tips

Add value with guides and how-to’s
Use lists like top tens, golden rules and so on
Offers industry news and current affairs
Use multi-media like podcasts and video
Blog regularly and comment on other blogs
Don’t be afraid of controversy, it attracts links
Offer services like industry-relevant calculators and tools
Respond and listen to visitor feedback
Don’t simply sell

On the tenth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me 10 tips for LinkedIn:

Complete your profile
Bag your vanity URL
Make your profile public
Connect with everyone you know
Request recommendations (where appropriate!)
Join relevant groups
Use LinkedIn Answers to boost your reputation
Use a descriptive job title
Link to your website using keyword-rich anchor text
Register your company’s profile

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me 11 pay-per-click tips:

Review competitors’ campaigns
Target a relevant geographic region
Manage your budget carefully
Choose enticing text
Carefully choose the destination URL
Monitor performance often
Don’t just target the most popular keywords
Monitor your conversion rate
Avoid running b2b campaigns at weekends
Use negative keywords to avoid irrelevant appearances
Be ready to adapt the campaign for game changing rules or if conversion falls off

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me 12 blogging rules:

Use short paragraphs
Avoid unnecessary punctuation
Check spelling, then check it again
Double-check grammar
Don’t exceed your vocabulary
Ask a colleague to proofread your copy
Link to relevant articles and information
Avoid repetition, even of keywords
Go beyond keyword stuffing
Use unique meta data
Post often
Be interesting

So what do you think? Surely it’s more festive than Rage Against the Machine! Have a great Christmas SEOptimise readers! ;)

SEO not Important in 2010? Robert Scoble’s Ironic Video Advertorial Confuses the Masses

Tad Chef — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:15:40 +0000

Robert Scoble by Alex de Carvalho

In the attention economy the attention rich win over those who get less attention. As controversy and ignorance creates more attention than common sense and boring expertise we have to deal with the phenomenon of SEO bashing every now and then. People pointing fingers saying “look at that, how stupid they are bashing SEO again” create even more buzz.

Web 2.0 celebrities can use this attention gap in order to push their own interests. Failed entrepreneurs like Jason Calacanis have done that in the past repeatedly to ride the wave of negative hype. So this time I was a little bit astounded to hear it from Robert Scoble the web pundit everybody seems to listen to.

I seldom listen to Mr. Scoble as I’m too busy to listen to my trustworthy friends and my own echoes on the Web: I’ve just been nominated as one of the 100 most influential online marketers of 2009. Not sure I am but if others say so, I maybe am. So let’s use a little of my perceived influence.

The real search and SEO experts already have explained once again, like they always do, that SEO is still alive and kicking so what the hell is this post about?

It’s about how Robert Scoble’s ironic video advertorial confused the masses and the search marketing industry. Yes, you heard right. It’s ironic and it’s an advertorial.

It’s ironic and an advertorial because these guys Scoble talks to are from an SEO company themselves.

In fact they even compete with us, SEOptimise, in the search engines. So I just did a little checking with some tools everybody can use to take a look at any website to find out why they deserve such attention. The guys in the video advertorial represent a company called roiworks.com

Keep in mind that the guys from roiworks.com present their site as a “Search Engine Marketing Firm”. Search engine marketing of course entails SEO, PPC and other online marketing tactics SEOptimise offers as well. Indeed we even have similar keywords in our HTML title: UK Search Engine Marketing Agency.

So let’s compare our rankings for search engine marketing firm:

roiworks.com is nowhere to be found. Neither in the US/Canada nor the UK.
We’re at 13 for search engine marketing firm in the Google UK results in spite of not having the actual word “firm” in the title at all.

OK, OK, we know search engine rankings don’t mean much, I’ve said it myself more than once. Let’s take a look at the backlink numbers via Yahoo Site Explorer then:

Yahoo backlink numbers don’t show much as well some people will argue. So let’s take a look at web analytics. roiworks.com exists at least since 2001 according to Archive.org but Google Trends or Google Ad Planner can’t find any data on them. So let’s try Compete.com! roiworks.com is an US company and Compete measures US traffic quite well so let’s take a look at the numbers for visits in November:

In case you wonder why we lost so many visitors over the recent months: I’ve been quite lazy lately. Aside of this there must be something wrong with these numbers, after all, they get featured by Robert Scoble and we don’t. Did they actually sleep with him? Or maybe they’re just friends.

The video setup by itself is also quite funny. You have those two awkward guys talking like for ages. The one, more the Woody Allen type is keen on stressing that black hat SEO is very, very bad while the other dressed in black and wearing a black hat like in a mafia movie might be his bodyguard.
They talk about SEO, search and search marketing all the time telling us how important it really is. For instance they argue that local search is crucial etc.

Update: Make sure to read the statement by George, CEO of roiworks.com

So Robert Scoble’s post asking whether SEO will not be important anymore in 2010 is just a rhetorical question. It’s as if you’d ask: will the sky still be blue in 2010? Will the sky be blue in 2010? Yes, it will. I recommend a post by SEOMoz which, among other predictions, shows a statistic according to which 78% of questioned marketers assign more importance to SEO in 2010.

Btw. Robert Scoble admitted the baiting of the SEO industry later on. Mr. Scoble is not stupid, but the reaction of the SEO industry is too predictable by now. Thus I don’t link to such SEO bashing posts and advise you to refrain from doing it as well. The company Mr. Scoble is featuring really needs attention and all those links. They barely got any. Unlike more “traditional agencies”.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. SEO not Important in 2010? Robert Scoble’s Ironic Video Advertorial Confuses the Masses

45 Link Baiting Resources: Ideas, Techniques, Case Studies & Drawbacks

Tad Chef — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:37:35 +0000

CC Image by radcarper.

Do you remember the term link bait or link baiting? While 2006 and 2007 link baiting was all the rage in recent years it seems people don’t talk or write much about this practice anymore. Has link baiting vanished? Not at all.

Link baiting is daily business right now, it’s the norm.

Indeed I would go as far as to state that link baiting is currently the most important link building tactic or strategy (depends on the bait really).

You can call me insane but I’d even argue that link baiting along with viral marketing are the only really scalable link building methods left. Link baiting allows you to get links while conventional techniques force you to build links.

Link baiting gets you real editorial links (that is links inserted by real people on their own blogs or sites) while most “built” links are low quality and in many cases easily recognizable by Google as set up solely for SEO reasons.

When you don’t know how to link bait you don’t know SEO.

Thus I collected a list of 45 link baiting Resources containing

ideas
techniques
case studies
drawbacks

among others.

This time I used the URLs itself in order to show you the sources and not to spam Google with keyword stuffing for the term link baiting. I’ve used this keword already too often in the preface.

Definition and Ideas

Lists

Techniques and other Resources

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/what-the-hell-does-lyndon-antcliff-know-about-linkbait/
http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/linkbait-lyndon-antcliff/
http://www.slate.com/id/2144785/
http://www.copyblogger.com/viral-copy/
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/17-ways-accelerate-links-link-bait-linkable-content.html
http://www.cornwallseo.com/search/2007/08/17/5-characteristics-of-successful-linkbait/
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/04/linkbait_chummi.html
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/psychology-linkbait/8643/
http://tropicalseo.com/2007/andy-hagans-ultimate-guide-to-link-baiting-and-social-media-marketing/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-actually-get-links-from-your-linkbait
http://www.pluginhq.com/ignite-your-linkbait/
http://www.doshdosh.com/social-media-marketing-strategy-the-mullet/
http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2008/01/09/soft-cloaking-for-social-media/
http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/forget-ugc-discover-user-generated-linkbait/
http://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/social-media-traffic/

Case Studies

Drawbacks

http://blog.v7n.com/2007/01/08/link-bait-downside/
http://searchengineland.com/doing-a-fake-story-for-linkbait-disclose-or-face-the-wrath-of-google-14056
http://www.cartoonbarry.com/2006/08/how_much_is_link_bait_worth.html
http://searchengineland.com/dont-call-me-linkbait-14076
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2007/10/can_link_bait_m.html
http://www.ericward.com/articles/linkbait.html

So you probably noticed that many of the resources stem from 2006 or 2007 but some of them even from 2005. Nonetheless they are still valid. Some of them are all time SEO classics every SEO practitioner should read. Of course I added some gems from 2009. So make sure to scan this list een if you’re a link baiting pro.

This list surely won’t ever become complete so feel free to add more link baiting resources.

Twitter Friday: TechCrunch Twitter Hacked Scandal – SEO?

Tad Chef — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:17:55 +0000

“He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone.” I admit reading or rather scanning the “confidential” Twitter documents obtained by Techcrunch from a hacker and published in excerpts. Of course I was curious. On the other hand:

Was this whole Techcrunch Twitter hacked scandal worth it?

Are we wiser now? Has humanity gained some new insights? Did Techcrunch prevent a corrupt president from breaking the law?

Let me begin from another starting point though: One of the confidential Twitter documents contains a mention of SEO. It reads literally: “SEO?” So we know now that Twitter is considering SEO. In case you are a SEO company you might want to cold call the Twitter founders or staff now. Unless of course you have some scruples left.

There are some additional facts about Twitter and search that make some news.

A so called TweetRank to be introduced
a better integration of Twitter results in Google blog search

Still, do we need this information to earn more money or change or our SEO tactics? Maybe a little. On the other hand we would know sooner or later anyways once they introduced it.

SEO practitioners often get accused of being unethical and some of them indeed prefer the “what works is OK” kind or ethics.

Here we have the probably most touted technology publication (or should I still say blog?) with an enormous popularity and readership. This publication gets away with publishing stolen documents for no other reason than SEO: It’s a classic link bait. They get a huge number of links and traffic of course. There is nothing to reveal here that should have been revealed. I’s clearly not Watergate. What will TechCrunch and other blogs learn from it? Hacking startups is great. You get an excellent exposure and more links than any conventional SEO tactic can get.

The next blogger will pay hackers to steal information from companies. Or wait: How do we know there was no money involved in the exclusive “hacker sends the Twitter data to TechCrunch” deal? Can we trust hackers? Can we trust TechCrunch not to pay hackers now that they did actually sell stolen goods? Yes, they did. The sell information because they earn money via ads displayed around it.

Michael Arrington complained a while ago that he was spat on by a stranger. I wouldn’t be surprised if more strangers start spitting at him now. That’s also the reason why I won’t neither link the TechCrunch article about the leaked documents nor mention the name of the hacker. Both want the publicity. I have given them enough attention.

So just what the hell is social media marketing?

Stuart Tofts — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:14:37 +0000

“Yeah, I’ve launched an SEO campaign based on generating buzz through the blogosphere and increasing my link juice to ensure I get great SERP positioning…”

CC Image Credit: Flickr

Online marketing is a strange world to the outsider, filled with jargon, buzzwords and rapidly developing language. One phrase in particular which seems to confuse many of my clients is social media marketing. I often get asked: “Do you mean, erm, Facebook? when I go on about the benefits.

So – just what the hell is it?

Social media marketing

It is the use of social media websites, namely those which publish user-generated content and build online communities, to generate positive publicity and manage web-based corporate personas.

It is about conversing with consumers rather than pitching at them.

Where?

Well, where are customers conversing online? You may decide to go to them via existing online communities, or you may decide to entice them to you using specially-created forums, blogs and other content designed to drive debate and encourage comment and participation.

The web is filled with these communities. From big names like Beebo, Facebook, Twitter, Del.icio.us and Digg to more niche spaces, such as NetMums, Econsultancy, even Cat Chat – whatever is best suited to whatever it is you sell.

How?

There are numerous options and before starting any social media marketing campaign, you’ll need to decide what fits with your corporate identity. You probably would not, for example, use Beebo if you make cleaning technology for hospitals – it is not appropriate for your business.

You also need to decide whether or not you intend to go to your customers via existing communities, encourage them to align themselves with your brand through setting up groups within these communities, or create your own content and spaces to entice them to come to you.

As with all social marketing tactics, a combination should be designed based on your company’s specific identity, needs and goals.

Don’t

Don’t pitch. Don’t pitch, don’t pitch, don’t pitch, don’t pitch. People using social media are socialising. You wouldn’t leap on a group in the pub and try to market at them, because that would create anger and bad feeling about your brand. So don’t do it online.

You need to add value to their internet time; doing that will encourage them back to your site, back to your brand, back to your products or services. However, simply trying to sell at them will swiftly alienate your clients and you will end up actually damaging your reputation.

Finally

A serious point to remember is that social media marketing is developing and, by its very nature, cannot be easily defined. A successful campaign is a carefully tailored one, there is no simple solution which works for all brands.

Furthermore, having begun this kind of marketing effort, it is essential to remember it is a long-term strategy; it won’t create overnight returns and it will take time to build these successful conversations. Building online relationships can be enormously satisfying, both in terms of creating a strong business image and through driving sales.

30 Ways to Get Links Naturally & Stop Link Building

Tad Chef — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:55:31 +0000

More and more conventional link building methods, like directory submission are of less and less value, Google does not even recommend high quality paid directories any more. In fact soon we’ll see a situation where all artificial ways of link building will be frowned upon.

On the other hand former SEOptimise writer and renowned UK search marketing blogger Patrick Altoft reported a few days ago about companies which spend thousands on link buying budgets per month. This way of link acquisition is not allowed by Google for a long time by now and many high profile sites have been penalized already.

While the urge of spending money on links comes as no surprise it is met by an often low quality shady part of the SEO industry. Getting links naturally requires also an investment, an allocation of time and resources combined with know how in some Internet industries like web design or development but not solely.

The money gets spend not on the links directly but on a web venture that gets links naturally and sustainably over time. The allure of “free” is in most cases the key to get links but also altruism leads to a direct ROI in terms of links. So think twice before spending money directly on low quality links.

Stop link building artificially and use one or several of the following 30 ways to get links naturally:

Create a timeless or regularly updated resource list, example Web developer’s Handbook
Program a free tool or software everybody needs in a particular niche but not everybody offers yet (compare the query font tester vs color picker)
Develop a high quality theme or template for a well known platform like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla that gets updated along the software
Program a WordPress or other popular blog platform plugin, in the best case a platform independent one like Akismet
Develop a Firefox plugin for a recurring task or dealing with a widely spread annoyance like BugMeNot
Organize a genuine yearly recurring competition like the Web 2.0 awards
Organize a Recurring charitable event like the Blog Action Day
Forge a lasting partnership with a similar service provider, like a graphic design agency joining forces with a PSD2XHTML provider
Build a community like 9Rules where people “proudly” are part of and display on it on their sites
Support artists with free or cheaper web hosting (or anything else they need) like MediaTemple does
Mirror a high traffic site, for instance an open source software or an activist site
Offer a rebate for a particular group, especially students but also workers class families, veterans or whatever disadvantaged group
Offer free music or other audio downloads. or at least a way to listen to the audio online, that’s the secret of success of MySpace
Offer free ebook or better free ebooks (more than one) like O’Reilly for instance
Maintain a business blog updated regularly with high value resources, best example is Inside CRM
Get your content translated and republished in multiple languages and countries
Join a community and become one of the most valuable members like Maki of DoshDosh did on Sphinn and Digg
Offer high quality free icons for download and free use
Offer background patterns for free for web designers
Offer free wallpapers for download and invite artist to modify them
Create a Facebook application and maintain it over time
Create a CSS solutions for common tasks or CSS problems or even better are whole set of solutions
Offer free scripts and “chunks code” (like CSS as it’s not a script) for webmasters to use freely
Create a highly useful and visually appealing Flash application like SimpleViewer
Give away images using a creative commons license on your website
Publish recipes for healthy, Italian, French, Chinese or any other kind of desirable food not everybody can buy
Offer fundamental self improvement advice like hackyourself does
Start a green initiative, whatever it might be, there are thousands of ways to do that, carbon free websites is great example
Educate children, especially from poor families be it in the West or down in the “global south”, e.g. the 100 Dollar laptop gained huge recognition
Help animals and boast about it displaying images of them you don’t have to as obnoxious as PETA

As you see many of these ways of getting links naturally are projects based on market forces or in other words on what many or most people need. The best thing on the Web is additionally that even free things normally not provided by the market can be offered in a profitable way as by gaining links the investment is made profitable at last.

Of course all these ways of getting links also get you reputation and fans and thus traction in social media too. People hate companies and businesses overselling but they love free stuff and those who offer it. When everybody loves you also those who are willing to spend money will find you.

In case you wonder now “how can I achieve that, I’m no programmer, designer, content creator, artist, activist” you don’t need to be, there are plenty out there are they’re short on money especially those from India. Sometimes even 100$ are enough.

SEO is Dad: The 30 Easiest Ways to Get Links and Exposure

Tad Chef — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:15:44 +0000

Most website owners rely on quick website tweaks and the right tools for measurable website success. That’s not wrong but that’s also not enough. Being serious about business, a webmaster must get links to get additional exposure via search engines, of course predominantly Google.

Google still judges a website mostly based on the number and quality of links pointing to it (backlinks). So even today you got to get links, be it via outstanding content, viral campaigns or just conventional link building. Still most people do not take all the measures easily available on the Web today. Some have been around for ages, others just popped up recently. Check the 30 easiest ways to get links and exposure.

Instant Link Building

Submit to paid web directories free ones are often low quality lately
Submit to a few quality article directories
Send out a press releases via a few online services
Answer questions on Yahoo Answers etc. and in forums
Add resources to user generated content sites like Zimbio, Associated Content or others
Ask your friends, family, employees to link to you
Add your link to your profiles on Web 2.0 services like MySpace, Twitter (in the Bio) or Propeller

Common Linking Incentives

Get a Delicious badge, and display the number of bookmarks as well as the tags
Offer a badge of honor, something like “a carbon neutral site”
Offer a button for voting to install on other websites & blogs
Offer a widget for bloggers, something useful that will spread by itself
Stage a contest, it should be fun and the prizes should be worth it
Organize a blog carnival choosing a topic that matters for many people
Link out plenty, especially to bloggers, some will link back others will bookmark, some links will appear directly as ping and trackbacks
Contact people who might link to you (I do not mean a reciprocal link request)
Mirror a popular high traffic site, all the webhosters do it that way
Give away content with a creative commons license, especially if you can offer images or music (or other audio)
Let people translate your content and republish it for free

Link Bait Ideas and Practices

Praise experts in your area who have blogs
“Pull a Calacanis” – Say something stupid to stir controversy (like “SEO is bullshit” or “Web directories are Web 3.0″)
Be the first to break a story, indeed check original sources first before just recycling news
Write a useful list, “100 ways of something” always get linked
Give away a real freebie, a fee version of your product, should be valuable for users
Use images of barely clad ladies, sorry I mean beautiful women to illustrate your point
Support a cause, like Blogcatalog does
Write something unbelievable, intriguing or that “strikes a chord”
Do something useful for the Linkerati, a list of Digg users who blog for instance
Create something for the lowest common denominator, best topic is cute cats
Declare something alive and kicking dead but in a way it makes sense
Say something funny like “SEO is Dad” ;-)

Please not that I intentionally did not include some not entirely ethical grey hat methodes like “submit to social bookmarking sites” or “comment on dofollow blogs” as these tend to become spammy in the wrong hands.

Google Ministry of Truth to ban Jason Calacanis for spreading false information

Tad Chef — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:03:26 +0000

Along with the “no future” fable in recent days we have seen another talk of the town or rather the global village: Spreading false information as SEO tactic of link baiting. Now I’m really glad! Finally Google will ban Jason Calacanis for spreading false information about SEO (“SEO is bullshit”) and his web directory Mahalo. Now let me explain the situation.

Matt Cutts in a discussion made clear that using such methods is fraudulent and can lead to a penalty by Google. Why did he say that in the first place? A hugely popular made up link bait article was disclosed as a hoax by the author of it, Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO. It was too late for Fox News and other news outlets on the British Aisles though, they reported the story as true without checking the facts or sources.

The implications of spreading hoaxes via the press is not my main focus here. It’s really a sign of low quality of major news outlets. That said let’s take a look at the Jason Calacanis case which is very similar to the undisclosed satire piece at Money.co.uk: He repeatedly stated that “SEO is bullshit”. Also he used at least one other version of this statement by saying “affiliate marketing is bullshit”. His “argument” was debunked dozens of times already so I won’t add another one of these SEO primers. I want to stress the undisclosed satire aspect of this infamous link bait.

Mr. Calacanis also is the man behind Mahalo. What is Mahalo according to it’s own definition?

“What is Mahalo? Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine”

When you take a closer look at the “engine” you quickly realize that it’s a not a revolutionary Web 3.0 concept it’s sold as but basically a web directory like any web directory we know since the early nineties. There are no robots or spiders and the algorithm seems to be rather a simple CMS that allows to publish a few thousands of pages.

Now is Mahalo a human-powered search engine? No, it’s not, it’s clearly a static website provided by editors (aka guides) and augmented with some user input. I’m sure the new, yet to be established Ministry of Truth, led by Mr. Cutts, truth expert of Google will quickly find out about that and ban Mahalo.

Also it is obvious that SEO is no “bullshit”. I even did some research on agriculture in this context. Livestock breeding experts agree that bullshit at least stinks. Now as SEO is purely virtual and limited to the Internet it can’t stink, so it can’t be bullshit either. Unfortunately this link bait tactic based on this false information has already spread and other people are using it. Now as Matt Cutts truthfully has spoken out about this problem I’m sure they all get banned. I’m glad. Please Google, ban them all. We really need a Ministry of Truth.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Google Ministry of Truth to ban Jason Calacanis for spreading false information

Why you need a lot of links

Patrick Altoft — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:35:26 +0000

While conducting some link analysis recently I started thinking about the process that Google would carry out to see if a site was building links against their guidelines.
The key issue is that if a site has 100,000 natural links thanks to some tools or articles on the site it is very hard for Google to flag the site as being unnatural if they spot a thousand paid links.

On the other hand if a site has 2000 links and 1000 of them are clearly paid then Google might take a much harsher view.

Having a largely natural link profile allows you to be much more aggressive with your on page optimisation and to use paid links to build your rankings without appearing to be gaming the system.