Sir, Would You Like Fries With Those Links?

Recently in several SEO forums I noticed a number of threads discussing ways to find and build "economical" links. The forum participants wanted to know how they could initiate "safe" reciprocal linking as well as "fast" submissions to free article directories. They reasoned these tactics were worth doing because both linking methods were "economical" and "easy" to use.

I understand some linking techniques can be expensive, tedious to implement and extremely time consuming, but tying your online business success to linking tactics deemed "easy", "fast" and "cheap" seems counter-productive. If you limit your linking to low-cost tactics or look at the practice as "link building" instead of "marketing for links" you're almost guaranteed to fail.

.EDU Links and the Maytag Repairman.

I live about 25 minutes outside of Richmond and travel up there a good bit to shop and work. When I read today that Richmond native Clay Jackson had been picked to be Maytag's company spokesperson (translation - the new MayTag Repairman) - I thought YEAH! Local man makes good. Cool.

I poked around the website MayTag used to launch and chronicle the search and hiring of their new repairman and was struck by its overall marketing and link potential. It was that employment blog that led me to think about jobs and job training which led to thinking about schools which of course made me think about edu links.

Whether you're a virtual or bricks & mortar company, offering information on your website about the job training programs you offer can attract people and links. Include detailed information on the training classes you're offering, job training requirements and any Federal and State regulations there might be to cover all the bases on your particular industry. Training is a hot topic and often cited as a resource when journalists are covering stories on the employment outlook in your niche. Make your site the resource they turn to when they're looking for factual and trend information.

Job training programs and their outlines are also eagerly sought after by high schools, community colleges, vocational schools, universities and teachers in general.

You'll need to be pro-active in contacting these opportunities as they typically don't have the time or resources to seek you out. Follow an online introduction with an offline brochure for added credibility and include references to any local students currently employed by your firm.

Once you think about how you can use your job training programs to secure quality links, it's easy to expand and develop programs for job fairs and your basic job opportunities as well. Job fair information is always welcome at places like your state and local employment commissions, Veteran Affairs offices, Chamber of Commerce and industry associations. While you may not always net a clean link from these government entities (although sometimes you will!), you'll definitely get a lot of eyeballs.

Getting Clean Links From NoFollow Lemons

I was just as dismayed as the next link builder when places like the Wikipedia, del.icio.us and YouTube decided to turn all their outbound links pink by adding nofollows. I had spent a good deal of time getting some of them placed and thought – oh well, there goes the neighborhood.

But! After thinking about it a bit I decided if I couldn’t get the juice from the link I’d focus on getting the link to the juice.

As a link builder it’s my job to find the best sites to secure links from. I’m after topically relevant, reputation heavy, growth oriented sites that host my demographic. Basically – popular sites in a given niche. If I find those top sites are using nofollow I'll still utter a curse word or two but it won't stop me from going after the link.

Why? There’s a very high probability the demographic frequenting the site will click through to mine because they trust the host site and assume any link they offer has to be relevant. It also doesn't hurt that I'll use the most alluring anchor text I can think of to further entice people to click. Once they land on your site it's up to you to do everything in your power to capture their information and attention.

With emphasis on their information. If you’re establishing new links, point them to pages with special offers and free giveaways that require registration to download. Give away whitepapers, discount coupons, survey results, newsletter memberships… anything with a perceived value that allows you to capture an email address.

This also works for established links now color coded pink. Change the content on the destination page and include the special offers. Once you have the email address, develop a link incentive and send it back to those people who downloaded your info. They took the first step in showing you they liked what they saw and wanted more info so follow-up with another offer and request to link. People link with sites they like or make them look good so take time to develop an incentive that’s mutually beneficial.

Just because someone found your site through a nofollow link doesn't mean they won't link to you using a clean one. You just need to find out who they are and then do the follow-up.

photo from http://wendyboucher.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/lemonade0001art006.JPG

Interesting Links.

Some interesting link related tidbits from around Internet Land...





Have a beef with your beer boss?

Use YouTube to get the word out. Personally I think it should be against the law to give a webcam to whiney people. http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/2007/03/miller_brewing_.html
(Sidenote) If they were Anheuser-Busch employees that video would have a link at the end pointing people to a well crafted landing page asking for donations toward their retirement fund. ;)-

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A post on the HR Forum asks - Are there any specific tips on getting edu sites to link to my site?

My buddy Randy Cullom responds: How to get .edu links? Have a site with subject matter that appeals to the education market. Without this connection as a reason for them to link to your site you're basically SOL. As to whether .edu's carry any special weight, we've discussed 'em around here a few times before. The short answer is: No they don't carry any magic link juice. Their magic, if you want to call it that, is they're usually very large, very diverse, usually decent quality sites that attract a lot of links from other diverse, quality sites. In other words, it's not the .edu TLD that carries any extra weight. It's the fact that they're high quality sites, just like you can find in .com's, .net's and every other TLD.
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Google's released a new patent application..

Here's some interesting info on how they may determine the quality score of a blog. Bill Slawski has done his usual great job picking apart the patent application and highlighted some of the more interesting parts, here's a few:

Number of times search terms appear in a blog post.

Places where search terms appear within the document (such as title or the text within the body of the post),

Characteristics of search terms appearing on thepages (such as font, size, color, etc.),

Search terms may be weighted differently from other search term when multiple search terms are present.

Proximity of search terms when multiple search terms are present may influence the IR score, and;

Other techniques for determining the IR score for a document can also be used.

Reading through the criteria I was struck by how similar sounding some is to a previous patent app that made the rounds a while back.

http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=541

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Calling all Nine Inch Nail Lovers...

Talk about thinking outside the box to promote your product! Not sure I want to use anything I found hidden in a restroom but hey - the rest is pretty damn interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(album)

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A number of new direstories have been added to ISEdb.com. Might find one to add your site to.

http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories/Specialty_Directories/

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The art of *nicheyness*.

http://www.dogster.com/ http://nurselinkup.com/ http://www.momcafe.com and http://www.eons.com
It's no surprise these niche sites are popping up given the success of "general" networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Since they're still new and relatively small, it would be a good time to build a profile and get involved as well as buy ad space.

Although MomCafe isn't just for breakfast anymore..... "The site has around 100,000 registered users and is expected to do 20 million page views in March, up from 1.8 million in December 2006."

Power to the soccer moms!

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Link Forum

I pop around to the various link marketing related blogs, forums, elance and techie sites a couple times a week to see what's going on in link marketing land. With so many resources to keep up with it's almost gotten as time consuming as link builidng itself!

I've pulled together a number of informative posts, articles and stories from these sources and will continue to do so as I find them. My formatting is a little off so patience as I work on it to be sure everyone gets proper credit for saying their piece. Here's what's up:

http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=45325

"Imagine how much effort has been devoted to generating links.... it would probably pay off the US National Debt."
Debra : LOL...

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http://www.seorefugee.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5011&page=2
"I do not think that directories per se are being devalued by Google merely by the fact of them being directories. Instead what I see is a ton of people attempting to build fly by night directories, inflate their value by renting a few high powered links, and then once they have sold their slots dropping the link rentals. Even though the PR of those directories stays until the next PR update, whatever value they had is of course lost once the links are no longer pointing at them. Since the practice is widespread, it does give the appearance of directories in general losing their value. "

Debra: Agree about the directories not being devalued because of what they ARE. Just by what their silly owners DO.
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http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showpost.php?p=9697&postcount=2 ..."The slick part is getting other people to put your articles with a link to you on their sites. Getting them to do it for free is time consuming and gives you no guarantee of anyone doing it or anyone keeping doing it. It does work, but in my experience not as well or as cheaply as just finding and renting the links you want. Making this the least slickest way I'll post here."

Debra: The slickest way to build links is to have other people do it for you. ;)

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http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/msg/33b3dbdfaba936b1

"Perhaps Google took a second look at your inbound links. 100 links to 50 pages is not enough, especially when most of them are from DMOZ clones or ugly dynamic (forum) URLs. These links don't carry weight. Get more related links from blogs and from within the textual content of related articles on authority sites."

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http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=29048&pid=242969&st=0&#entry242969

"Given that over half the sites that get listed in DMOZ were never even submitted, then thats not a record. Over 10 000 sites have been added in the last 4 weeks." (post was made 3/10/07)

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http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=031000YVYZEV
"Retailers are taking a page from MySpace. They know that customers, especially the younger and more Net-savvy, want to be heard, and they also want to hear what others like them think. So increasingly, retailers are opening up their Web sites to customers, letting them post product reviews, ratings, and in some cases photos and videos. "
Debra: Good ideas for ecommerce sites who find it difficult to attract links.

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http://www.toptechnews.com/news/Blogger-Turns-Paper-Clip-Into-Home/story.xhtml?story_id=031000YVVFWA
"The deal was still warm when MacDonald was contacted by the Mayor of Kipling, Saskatchewan. The town of 1,100 traded MacDonald a three-bedroom house on Main Street in exchange for the movie role. The town plans on holding an "American Idol"-style competition for the part, with entry fees going to charity. "
Debra: Shouldn't that be "Canuck Idol'? (just for you Ian!)