So without further ado,

How did you get started in link building?

In 1998 I started an organic foods directory as a hobby site, it did very well and by early 2000 companies on the Directory were asking me to help them market and SEO their sites. Since I had no idea what SEO was, I started researching the topic and met Jill Whalen as a result. She patiently explained the way I was using links was something called SEO link building. I worked for her for a period of time before launching Alliance-Link in late 2000.

If I was training to be a doctor, there would be a clear cut educational path for me to follow- go to college, major in this, go to medical school, take these courses, do this residency etc… With link building/internet marketing there is no such established path. You are a highly experienced link builder with a great reputation. If you were to set a “formalized path” for a link builder in training, what advice would you give them? What books to read? What experiences to have? What authors to follow? Any foundational posts from around the internet that standout to you?

I don’t know of any Associate or Bachelor  degree programs  but there are a number of Internet Marketing certificate programs as well as individual classes in the Business and Sociology curriculums from accredited colleges.  So while there might not be a formal path right now, I can see one coming in the near future.

In the meantime, if you’re serious about wanting to work in link marketing or SEO in general, I’d recommend finding a well established firm to intern with while going through a training program like SEOBook.   From there I’d follow the link building articles written on Search Engine Land,  Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Watch, there is no shortage of great information on any of these venues.

As for books,    I don’t read or follow a lot of so called “Internet marketing gurus”,  don’t think they’re sharing anything new and I’m easily bored by purple cows and talk of Facebook.  Instead I focus on listening to computer science/IT  investors like Jaron Lanier (his  latest book is awesome)  Ester Dyson and Jim Hendler because  these people make me think.  What they lecture on is based on the technology  and economics behind the  Internet both of which are key to understanding what happens on the Web and how to be successful in link building.

From a marketing perspective I draw on the classics for inspiration and keep copies of books by Ted Levitt, David Ogilvy and James Young on my desk (literally). I also like Robert Solomon’s “The Art Of Client Service” and Tamar Weinberg’s “The New Community Rules” for their practical viewpoints. I am of the opinion link building is more about marketing and less about HTML so I tend to focus my reading and book recommendations on marketing and computer science books.

How do you judge a successful link building campaign?

A happy client The key to success is pretty simple really – you have to establish goals and meet them. Anything less is failure and anything more is gravy.

Without giving away too much, what are some of your favorite tools to use, or places to go fishing for new ideas/relationships when you take on a new link building client?

When I need to use tools, I use the SEOBook line and of those, I use the Hub Finder the most. I also use the Yahoo! Site Explorer, SoloSEO’s utility link tool and Michael Van DeMar’s Bad Neighborhood tool.  I have about six different alerts services going at all times, for client work I stick with the private tools but for general searches I go with Google Alerts.  It’s free and a very good service.

I spend a lot of time on Topix looking for leads as well as general directories such as BOTW and the Librarian’s Index and I’m a firm believer in buying media lists. I’ve gotten away from using standard press release submission services and now focus almost exclusively on the niche wire services. The bigger the Web/Net gets the more important it is to segment.

Link building these days is less about how you link and more about where.

What’s your advice regarding using tools for SEO (the tools that automate the development of links etc), or one of the many services where you pay $50 for 50,000 links?

There are a lot of different way to build links but the way I work doesn’t require tools outside the discovery process so I have little experience with tools other than those I mentioned earlier. I do however, have a strong opinion about services promising 50000 links for $50 and recommend webmasters avoid them. I have no idea how anyone could secure a huge number of links unless they own the networks they’re on , are buying or hijacking them. That’s a big and easy trail for an engine to follow so I’d steer clear.

The other point here is even simpler – you get what you pay for. Paying $50 for 50000 links means you’re going to get a pile of crap which again – won’t work for the long term and can potentially bring unwanted attention to your pages. Who needs that?

Most valuable link in your opinion and why? (A) High PR link on some crusty old website; (B) 200 anchor text links from a website with the homepage of PR0; (C) A handful of links on topically relevant albeit obscure websites; (D) two or three links that actually bring waves of traffic to your site?

I’m going to eliminate C from the mix right off because I believe what I said about the “where ” being one of, if not the most important aspect of linking these days. Doesn’t matter the page is on topic, if a search engine ranks that page #130 it’s doing so because it doesn’t have any weight. So C is out because of the obscurity issue.

I still think anchor text is the most influential component of link popularity but I love- love-love links which drive a ton of traffic because we adapt the PPC model of landing pages and turn that traffic into link partners. So… I’ll also eliminate A since you’ve written it as a single link and say it’s a tie between B and D.

But! I will say this about B. Dropping 200 anchor text links is waaaaay too many for a single link campaign. It’s way too many for a multiple link campaign so it’s best to forget about securing large numbers of preset anchors when you link. I’ve always been less concerned about how many links I’m getting as I am about what they say. If I implement a lot of campaigns at the same time in different areas ( publicity, promotions, and sales) and stagger my anchors, link acquisition looks normal because I’ve balanced the elements which affect link popularity. Here’s a very basic example:

You have a new product and want to use it to build links. Before going public, you do a soft launch to your customers with an invitation to link and incentive (sales.) You then run a national contest (promotions) and announce it via press release (publicity). You also send a release announcing the winner.

While the first part s is going on, you instruct your copywriters to create a humorous piece of link bait which is launched on Digg and a handful of other social media sites (promotions). The linkbait has a tie-in to the contest. (promotions) A blogger outreach program begins and offers free samples of the new product and an invite to review or send rate cards with advertising opportunities (promotions). Once the reviews come in, bundle them, and send release showcasing the successful launch. (publicity).

Based on the success of the launch, have sales and copywriting staff write a case study/white paper referencing the process, reviews and customer feedback. Offer white paper to key journalists before going public, (publicity) and then add the paper to any content source that will take it (promotions).

And so on. By the time this link cycle is complete, you will have touched on almost every facet of marketing without having to purchase a single link or having any one of the tactics stand out. Balance is key.

Debra, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom! Blessings on your company!

I am still on the interview kick, so today I have a local marketing expert, Eric Covino to answer some questions about local business marketing.

Eric, you recently wrote about how Search for Local Businesses is going to be large in 2010. How would a small business know if SEO/PPC/Social Media Marketing would be successful for their niche without dumping a lot of time and money into it?

Thanks for having me today Zach. It is difficult to make broad statements about local marketing and small businesses. Location matters, size of the market matters, whether it’s B2C or B2B matters, etc.

There are a few things local businesses can do to check out the landscape of their marketplace. For example, a local car dealership in my area has a survey at the end of every sale which asks what radio stations the buyer listens to, what newspapers they read, do they use Google, Microsoft or Yahoo to search, do they use Twitter/Facebook/Myspace. This is a great thing to do with new (and past/current customers) because each local area of the country can be so different.

So they can attack on a couple fronts. For SEO and PPC what they’d want to do is set up a PPC campaign (well 2 of them) to target non-geo specific keywords like “used cars” while targeting that to their market radius (20 miles around whatever town/city) and a second campaign with no radius targeting but using local keywords like “town/city used cars”. This way they can tell if there is any broad based search volume or if the market uses location specific keyword modifiers, which can make a huge difference in PPC pricing. Local search volume is usually much less than broadly searched terms so establishing an SEO campaign early on, without the PPC data is pretty fruitless outside of making sure you show up for branded queries. Also, don’t forget to bid on your local competitors names because lots of local companies do not have a web presence of their own so why not take their business too .

Google’s local business center also gives impression data for how many times the map listing showed up so that is another good data point to consider before starting an SEO campaign.

A second front is the social media area. Twitter has not worked out well in local markets in my experience. This can differ by location though, perhaps operating in a larger city market would produce more users of Twitter thus making it more worthwhile to utilize. I tend to see more success with Facebook. Facebook has the ability to spread much faster amongst a user base than MySpace and it is much easier to interact + create custom stuff (hello Facebook only coupons!) on Facebook than MySpace. Again, surveying customers is a great way to nail down which one is the better choice or if both are. Although some local business owners do not have the time or resources to be heavily involved in both.

Most local clicks are cheap so maybe budget $500 for a local campaign to determine search volume, searcher intent, etc. It’s free to survey new customers and probably pretty cheap to reach out to past or existing customers so I don’t think they have to break the bank to determine if any of these measures are right for them.

You have a good reputation for driving leads to local businesses through marketing on the internet, without giving too much away, can you talk a bit about your approach…

It really isn’t that complex. It just requires a competent marketer and a client willing to listen and be patient.

We have all sorts of different packages for small businesses encompassing design, custom development, SEO, PPC, social media etc. The lead generation stuff usually starts off with the PPC side of the house. Giving the SEO campaign time to gain traction as well as the social media rollout. We also do stuff with offline marketing. The key is tracking. You can set up cheap numbers for different campaigns through places like phone.com or create custom url’s and track them through your analytics program(s).

We like to try a flurry of things at once to get lots of exposure and to generate buzz online and offline. Again, it is really just about tracking, creating specific phone numbers, landing pages, and/or url’s to track the leads.

Agreeing on the lead price differs across different markets and generally we do something like a per lead cost in additional to managing the marketing campaign(s).

PPC encompasses all the paid search options with the search engines as well as Facebook and MySpace ads when appropriate. It’s really just a case of setting up your tracking system (this is crucial) and your analytics program on the web side plus buying ads in places where your potential customers might be (within reason of course). Most local businesses, in my experience, tend to have better success with the paid options in Bing, AdWords, Facebook, and in buying cheap space on other relevant local sites.

Twitter and Facebook are all the rage as the “new” places to market. What is your feedback for local businesses who want to try out these marketing avenues?

Make sure you have the resources to keep it current. No one likes a stale Twitter or Facebook page. I find Facebook to be far superior to local businesses because you have lots of options with custom apps and your page can spread pretty quickly. Driving traffic there is pretty easy too (from your homepage or from your actual office) with things like “Facebook Friend Only Coupons” and things of that nature.

I would say try to post at least once every couple of days, even if it is just a brief summary of a new product, new hours, a new employee, a blog post, etc. Much like everything else you have to give people a reason to stick around. Coupons and special deals are *huge*.

If you can’t allocate resources to both then go with Facebook. It offers so much more in terms of engagement, which is really what you are shooting for at the beginning.

I know that you used to be in insurance, and have worked with a lot of realtors as well. If you were an insurance salesman, or a realtor today where would internet marketing play into your repertoire today? If you were an insurance guy or a realtor who was trying to market themselves on the internet today, what would you do?

It would be right at the top of my list with community involvement and local business partnerships. Many local businesses, specifically insurance and real estate agents, are seriously lacking in a strong web presence. Home/Services/Hours/Contact Us just doesn’t cut it anymore.

You have to find ways to engage customers and find new ones. Insurance agents can use email marketing to cross sell and keep in touch with current clients, to survey new clients, and to send out special offers to clients throughout the year (refer a friend programs and things like that). They can use videos to briefly discuss specific coverage options. Most of them can use an iframe on their site and offer live quotes through whatever quoting engine their office uses. They can use PayPal or link directly to insurance company pages for bill paying purposes. They can partner with a developer to tie in their site with their CRM to offer client basic login privileges. GEICO just released an iPhone app to help with reporting a claim (capturing info and pictures).

Real estate agents can use the same types of things for different reasons. Email marketing to stay in front of past customers, custom video tours instead of those ugly powerpoint slideshows with elevator music, tie in with the MLS system to allow for searching on their site, etc.

Both can use PPC traffic to gain additional lead sources and create social media sites to further engage their audience.

By nature, most small businesses are run hands-on by the owners so doing all this may be a bit difficult which is why they need to hire a company to do it for them. It shouldn’t be cost prohibitive as competition for PPC and SEO is usually pretty weak in local markets.

Looking a couple years down the road, how much do you see the growth of Google local, Yelp, mobile internet and avenues like Facebook influencing the way people find information about local businesses.

I am shifting a big part of my overall strategy to local stuff. I think local is where a lot of the opportunity is going to be going forward. Having your business show up across the board on local searches (google, bing, yelp, yellowpages, mobile stuff, facebook, etc) is going to be really important as the mobile generation continues to age and become mainstream consumers. As the web becomes more segmented with more socially integrated applications and sites it is going to be very important for local businesses to make sure they have the ability to be found by consumers across a broad, broad range of search methods.

For businesses that do it now, they will be at significant competitive advantage over their competitors who will be trying to play catch up 1-3 years from now.

Google has been showing local ads for non-local searches for awhile now. To me, that hints to the point that they have received feedback or have data showing search is trending more towards local stuff.

As an example, a local insurance agent can’t compete with GEICO or Progressive in broad paid search but they can win in the organic results with good SEO and they should be listed in Google/Bing local as well. Most are not, but the ones that are usually do pretty well. One would think that a local listing might hold a bit more weight on a keyword which is using local modifiers.

4 books/blogs/sites etc that you think are on point as far as learning about marketing trends/seo and whatnot…

SeoBook.Com

Any Guerilla Marketing Book (the more recent ones like Guerilla Marketing on the Internet)

The Art of Pricing by Rafi Mohammed

Seth Godin.Typepad.Com (and all his books)

Thanks Eric for your time today! If anyone is looking for a local marketing expert in the New England region, Eric is your man. He is currently rebranding his site, so in the mean time, feel free to contact him at covinoeric AT mac.com

picture credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisgold/4048192269/

I recently did an interview with Wiep Knol Linkbuilding.nl, here is the scoop. When Wiep talks it’s time to take notes:

How did you get started in link building?

Well, that was by coincidence, actually. During my Marketing Management study, I got into online marketing during an internship. I ended up at a company that was ‘managing’ somewhere between two and three thousand low quality websites. I had the dreadful task to promote these websites.

Believe it or not, but this helped me learn a lot about how *not* to build a website, and how *not* to promote websites. Nothing is a better teacher than trial and error. After my study, I was hired by Tribal Internet Marketing, a Dutch SEM agency. They didn’t offer link building yet, which meant that I had to set up a new service, and had the opportunity to bring my knowledge to a new level as well.

If I was training to be a doctor, there would be a clear cut educational path for me to follow- go to college, major in this, go to medical school, take these courses, do this residency etc… With link building/internet marketing there is no such established path. You are a highly experienced link builder with a great reputation. If you were to set a “formalized path” for a link builder in training, what advice would you give them? What books to read? What experiences to have? What authors to follow? Any foundational posts from around the internet that standout to you?

I have trained quite a few link builders, and basically I have the same approach as Todd Malicoat. Articles like Adam Audette’s fundamentals of link building are great for inexperienced link builders, and these other link building articles are good reads too. Additionally, some ebooks, such as the ones from SEOmoz or Wordtracker, and SEObook’s training section also contain excellent tips and information. Oh, and all the advice that Debra Mastalers leaves in the SEObook community as well.

After reading about link building, the best training is to give someone a website. Let him or her play with a small affiliate or test website (or maybe two), to find out what works and what doesn’t.

How do you judge a successful link building campaign?

Actually, that depends on the goals of the link building campaign. When we’ve met the goals that we initially set, a link building campaign is usually a success. These goals can differ, though, as building links for traffic, rankings or sales may require a different approach, and can lead to different results. An important factor for me is that it looks natural.

What’s your advice regarding using tools for SEO (the tools that automate the development of links etc), or one of the many services where you pay $50 for 50,000 links?

People will always keep searching for shortcuts. When you don’t have deep pockets and also don’t like link building, a ‘50,000 PR5+ links for $19,95′ offer can look very tempting. However, you *always* get what you pay for, and sometimes you’ll get even less.

As for the automation tools – I don’t use them, but I can imagine a few of them may be useful for some people. However, when you’re working with an important, non-disposable website, I wouldn’t risk it.

Without giving away too much, what are some of your favorite tools to use, or places to go fishing for new ideas/relationships when you take on a new link building client?

Besides the tools that I mentioned here and here, I also love using LinkedIn. It can be very useful to go through a client’s LinkedIn profile, and see who he’s connected to. You’ll be surprised to see how well connected some people are, which can make the life of a link builder much easier.

Most valuable link in your opinion and why? (A) High PR link on some crusty old website; (B) 200 anchor text links from a website with the homepage of PR0; (C) A handful of links on topically relevant albeit obscure websites; (D) two or three links that actually bring waves of traffic to your site?

It depends on the situation, but in most cases I’d go for D. If the links are relevant and your content is good, those two or three links will result in quite some traffic, some conversions and a probably a few new links as well.

How do you keep track of the latest link baits that have been successful across niches?

You can never follow everything, but Twitter, Delicious and email can cover quite a lot.

Photo Credit: Note Taking

For part II in my series of interviews, I chose Chris Angus, was just voted the second most influential internet marketer in the UK, 24th in the world.  Chris specializes in link building and viral marketing in hyper-competitive niches like finance, travel and gambling.

How did you get started in SEO and Viral Marketing?

It all started in the mid-2000s. Always having been incredibly ambitious, I was looking to start my own company. An opportunity came up for me to buy the framework for an internet pharmacy. I duly went ahead and purchased the website without a clue as to how the internet or SEO actually worked, or even how to generate internet traffic. The first method I used was “email marketing”, where I was sending out hundreds of thousands of emails every day. I had some moral issues with spamming the world and selling drugs to drug addicts, as we weren’t just selling over the counter medicines, we were also selling vicodin, etc.

I tried to hire many an SEO company, however, none were interested enough to take on my custom. So I started to look around at trying to work out what you had to do to get good rankings on the search engines, predominantly Google. Once I’d actually figured out what SEO stood for and meant, I thought the best thing to do would be to buy a book, so I googled “SEO book” and duly found Aaron Wall’s site. I bought the book, read it a number of times over and subsequently fell in love with Search.

Aaron basically mentored me, he was always very generous with his time and most of the time answered my questions when I emailed him. If it wasn’t for Aaron and his book, I definitely wouldn’t be in the position I am today.

When you put together a viral marketing campaign is your hope that it would draw links to the target site or sheer traffic and brand awareness?

Coming from an SEO perspective, I’m always focused on the links. However, the SEO market is changing and we’re becoming a bit more holistic in our approach to search and are focusing on brand-building and the benefits that can bring, as well as the links.

So, to answer your question, they’re all important and also, if you get a viral campaign to spread successfully, you’ll look incredibly good in your client’s eyes if you have hundreds of thousands of engagements with the brand.

People say that popular pieces on sites like Digg and Stumble Upon don’t draw links like they used to, blog commenting is dead, directory submission is passé and avenues like Twitter are useless for link building. What’s your experience from the front lines in some highly competitive industries like gambling, finance and travel as for strong link building channels?

While what you say is true, and links are incredibly hard to come by, they’re not that hard if you’re willing to be creative and different. If you’re going to attract the links, you need two elements:

1. Something unique or incredibly resourceful that people are going to want to link to.

1. You need enough people to see the resource, so that you get a tiny conversion rate in terms of people linking. Generally, you need tens or hundreds of thousands of people to see a resource if you’re using tradition traction methods such as Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

Alternatively, you can build relationships with bloggers and webmasters, so that when you create something of value, you can go out and ask them directly to link to it and the conversion rate is typically higher than if you were to use traditional accelerants such as the social networks.

If you create something which garners the offline media’s interest, it’ll spread to traditional media online and said resource will “bounce” back and forth between the two. Subsequently, the two will keep fuelling each other, building up and generating considerable exposure and a high number of links.

Of course, there are also paid links which are available. However, since what we have at stake is rather a lot, it’s not something that we really pursue anymore, as the risks outweigh the benefits in terms of buying links.

What are some of the best viral marketing/link baits that you have seen in the last couple of years that we might not know about?

Burberry did a really good campaign recently (The Art of the Trench).

“Will It Blend?” is also a great example of using interesting stuff, taking plain and boring things like blenders and doing something crazy with them. This in turn creates a viral effect in that users/viewers will want to share it with others, propagating the product/video itself.

Why do you like promoting companies in super competitive niches where links are hard to come by?

It’s what I’ve always done, I think I was quite lucky by starting off doing super-competitive things which I succeeded at quite early on and then understood that it could be done. I’ve always been in the super-competitive industry and I’m glad I fell into it, as the fees we attract are considerably higher than those in other, less-competitive vertical markets.

With the growth of Google local, and the incorporation of recent tweets into search results, how is your approach to marketing sites changing, is it business as usual or are you focusing on new areas outside of traditional Google search results?

Of course, we investigated spamming Twitter, which was just a bit of fun. However, our overall approach isn’t changing in that we help our clients to build their brands by offering services or resources which will create success by encouraging users to return to the site or treat the site as an authority.

If you can do this and achieve success without the search engines, then your business will be incredibly stable and you’ll receive a ton of free Google traffic as an additional bonus to your already successful venture. I would encourage people to think about building value as opposed to spamming the search engines, as people who do things properly will generally stick around a lot longer than having a short-lived time riding high, albeit very briefly.

Thanks Chris for taking your time for this interview. Good luck in your future projects!

Photo Credit:

I recently interviewed Aaron Wall, of SEO Book and PPC Blog about his perspective on SEO, link building and marketing in general.

Aaron, you have helped literally thousands of people market their own sites through seo and internet marketing. What advice would you give to the novice website owner or business owner who was desiring to seo their site/ or invest and have someone/some agency do it for them?

I wouldn’t pay someone else to do it without learning at least a bit about it yourself. At a minimum you should be able to figure out what market segment you want to be in, and what domain name you want to build from. But the more knowledge you have the better.

Try to get analytics installed right away such that you are learning based on actual data rather than abstractions.

I think going to a conference or 2 is a great call. Reading a half-dozen books and subscribing to a couple of your favorite blogs is well worth doing if time permits.

You are constantly quoting new sources and articles related to marketing and the economy. Can you give us a 5-7 sites/books/authors that are really shaping the way you develop your business today?

The reason I like finance so much is economics really ties in with marketing and there is so much data that can be used to add clarity to murky markets. People like Eric Janszen have to be able to think clearly to beat the markets…and they share that sort of thinking in a way that help you improve your own clarity.

Financial sites & blogs

• iTulip.com forums (paid, but sooo worth it)
• Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture
• Karl Denninger’s The Market Ticker

Books

• Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think
• Seth Godin’s Purple Cow
• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody
• Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Non-linear History (disclaimer: this one is a tough read)

Papers & Research & Such

• The Tragedy of the Commons
• Cumulative Advantage
• Filthy Linking Rich
• Google’s remote quality raters guideline documents (they let you know far more of the “whys” of search than what engineers share publicly)

I also look at a lot of the top SEO and marketing blogs. Probably the #1 in terms of reporting new breaking news would be the daily email newsletter from Search Engine Land. It has more than a lot of people need (especially more than people who are not industry insiders), but virtually no important news is skipped…if it is important they cover it (or link out to someone who is).

You once said that if you were going to train a link builder two of your starting points would be to teach them how to use RSS feeds and to understand linking biases on sites. Could you explain that comment a bit more and give us some examples?

I think there are many different forms of link building

• building relationships in your market
• researching a competitor’s top backlinks and trying to mechanically clone them
• egobait (awards, interviews, contests, etc.)
• launching linkbaits and then promoting them (either within your industry or to broader industries)
• Understanding the biases of publishers in your field and other fields helps you know how to write to get coverage (if that is what you are seeking). For example, after reading the Google remote quality rater guidelines and then seeing a Mahalo page with no content on it (well all scraped content) I knew that if I wrote about Mahalo being spam that Valleywag would pick it up. Likewise, when writing about click fraud I knew certain people would link at it.

As a political disclaimer I would like to state that I do not like either of the 2 main political parties in the United States. Radiohead had a song called the gloaming where it mentions “shadows blue and red” talking about how both political parties are shadows of their former selves and serve the same masters. And with that in mind…

Microsoft did research on some political blogs which showed that people were most commonly reading and linking to stuff that was philosophically related to their own biases. How you approach a shotgun toting southerner vs a tree hugging hippy are different.

Shared biases can be learned through market interactions, and can even be a large reason for success. How do talentless hypocritical hacks like Rush Limbaugh & Ann Coulter become famous, other than being polarizing ideologues?

And while searching for the liberal equivalent of those nut jobs, I came across this comment on Yahoo! Answers

“You must be talking about Bill Maher, he’s about as obnoxious and despicable as they come. I cancelled HBO because of him ! “

quite polarizing, no? And then, of course, there is Michael Moore….

Beyond learning the biases…you can also use RSS to consume a lot of information efficiently and be one of the first people in a particular niche with new news. So a lot of mainstream sources break news, but write about everything under the sun. If you are the first person in niche x (with a large readership of people in niche x) then you can get a lot of links by writing about your take on market trends and what the media is saying.

You often stress the importance of relationship building in a niche and becoming a thought leader in a niche as a way to garner links. If you were starting out in a niche in which you had no connections and no money, how would you go about developing the relationships and becoming a thought leader?

I would start a blog within the first week. And I would buy at least a half dozen how to books. In addition to reading and learning and trying to write about the stuff I was learning about I would also subscribe to many leading blogs in the industry and follow them. Following important spreading stories that bubble up on forums is important too…because if you see what questions keep coming up well that tells you what topics to target with really great content. In addition Google News (and some other news sites) allow you to create custom RSS feeds based on keywords, so you can track how your industry bubbles up in various areas.

As far as building relationships goes, I think participating in smaller communities is better than bigger ones, I think relevant and useful value add comments help, and it is hard to stress the value of in person interaction where/when possible.

And another area where people are weak is in cultivating what they have back home…make sure you allow comments on your posts, and try to thoughtfully answer every non-spam comment you get.

Before I started a blog and did all that other stuff I would read these 2 pages

• http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-dominate-your-niche/

• http://www.seobook.com/bloggers

One last tip here…anything that you have that the rest of the market doesn’t is an advantage to you.

So if you are good at graphics use them early and often. If you are good at analogies and have experience in another field and can sorta relate them…well, try to share that where it makes sense. If you are good on camera then use videos to help spread your message and build an audience. And so on…

If you are the first person to do something then it is easy for it to be seen as remarkable. So you can’t copy someone else and beat them (or at least not very often), but if you can put stuff in new formats it is easy for it to spread.

When my wife launched this PPC flowchart all we did was mention it and the thing took off like wildfire. We knew it was a good idea based on seeing people like some of the SEO flowcharts we made.

And that is where being willing to spend a bit extra to buy the newest version of Camtasia or SmartDraw can yield a big competitive advantage over 10,000 bloggers who are all writing the same crap in the exact same format

What are your most relied upon tools in your internet marketing arsenal?

I certainly am a big user of the Google search-based keyword tool, analytics tools, and competitive research tools. Due to our (small) company structure we don’t use link research tools as much as some people likely do…though in time if we grow I suspect we will look at those a bit more.

Another thing that helps here is just being willing to put in the time to research. If you search for the most linked to pages on competing sites (from Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer) that can give you some ideas of what has worked in the past and maybe what ideas you can try new spins on. The same is true for popular Digg and Delicious stories.

Thanks Aaron for a great interview! Readers, if you are interested in more from Aaron, please check out SEO Book and the PPC blog.

First as I pointed out in the post about Business.com, lets look at what Matt Cutts says regarding paid directory submissions.

To summarize he notes:

• Does it have End User Value: is it  a list of links or is it valuable to users? BOTW is fairly stringent about the quality of the websites they list, actually making it a decent directory for finding relevant sites, so yes it has an end user value.
• Is There a High Price Point on Getting In: The higher the better… At $299 (for the one time listing) its a pretty high price point.
• Does it have Editorial Value: Do some sites get rejected, and like I said before the answer is yes on that front.

Note that BOTW along with Yahoo Directory are the two examples Mr. Cutts points out as being of high quality. There is your answer straight from Google’s mouth .

A few other reasons why I like BOTW for directory submissions:

• They offer a one off payment
• Pages in the directory even down 5 levels from the home page have been crawled recently
• Your site is grouped with topically relevant sites in your niche
• Your site link is listed on a page with a title that is important to your keyword niche
• Its a link that can separate you from competitors not willing to pay $299 to be listed.

So all in all, when I am doing directory submissions, BOTW is definitely on the list.

Well, the truth of the matter is that it depends. How much is a particular ranking worth to your business? Are you in a competitive field? Do you have more time than money or money than time? As with most things, there are just a ton of variables.

If rankings matter to you, and if your niche is somewhat competitive, IMO, Business.com can be a great directory to be listed in for most websites. Why?

Well, when the guys at SEOmoz put out their 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors they listed the 5 most important factors in Search Engine Rankings in 2009 as:

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
2. External Link Popularity (How many total external links point to your site)
3. Diversity of Link Sources (How many unique domains link to your site)
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Page Title
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain

So let’s see how a listing in Business.com matches up to those factors

Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

Business.com realizes that often times a website name has very little to do with the content of a website and as a web searcher, you need descriptive words to know if you want to visit a site. Thus they ask you in their TOS to please make the anchor text of your link descriptive.

External Link Popularity (How many total external links point to your site)

In the effort to gain more links to your site, Business.com is a great source as it is a fairly easy link to get if you have a decent website and are willing to let your website be editorially reviewed.

Diversity of Link Sources (How many unique domains link to your site)

Business.com is an easy way to diversify the backlinks that your site has.

Keyword Use Anywhere in the Page Title

Getting in the right directory category allows the link to your site to fall on a topically relevant page- meaning relevant links are good links!

Trustworthiness of the Domain

Using SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool, Business.com shows a domain trust of about 6.6 out of 10. To put that in perspective, USAToday has a domain trust of around 7.5 and the Dallas Morning News does as well. So in terms of the trust level of the domain, it is on par with those two news sources. Not bad for a one off price of about $299 forever!

Matt Cutts on the Value of Directories For Search Rankings

Matt Cutts, the Google czar of search quality, talked about what makes a directory a valuable link in this video

To summarize he notes:

• End User Value: is it  a list of links or is it valuable to users? FWIW, I know lots of people get solid business leads from Business.com, so it is a valuable service.
• Price Point on Getting In: The higher the better… At $299 its a pretty high price point.
• Editorial Value: Do some sites get rejected, and the answer is yes on that front.

So in the end, my vote is a big Yes if search engine rankings are valuable to your business plan.

Here’s a Coupon for $50 off The Business.com directory listing:

Click the image and $50 will be subtracted when you enter your website. Good Luck!

The other posts in the series are:

• Overview of Finding the Linkerati
• 17 Motivations for Linking
• Related Ideas (this post)
• Search operators to find Linkerati.
• How to use directories like DMOZ, & Yahoo Directory to build links (and no I don’t mean being listed in them).
• How to use Social Media sites like Delicious and Digg to find the linkers.
• Studying the masters to find linking opportunities.

This is a simple but profound concept. Most people when they are looking at link building just think straight forward. Let’s take the travel industry for example and specifically hotels that are looking to promote themselves. Natural tendency is to just think, “OK, hotels. How can I get links to hotels? Who is linking to information about hotels?”

Now, if you use the 17 motivations for linking you will likely build yourself a pretty decent list of potential communities of linkerati to target. But you can grow this list exponentially if you will take the concept, in this case “hotels” and brainstorm related ideas.

In 30 seconds, here is a list of related ideas to a particular hotel-

• geographic location,
• style of hotel,
• specials the hotel runs,
• employee backgrounds,
• businesses nearby,
• architectural methods,
• famous people that have stayed there,
• technology in the hotel,
• hotel restaurant
• & community relations.

Now if I take each of these ideas, for example the graphic location of the hotel- in this case Dallas, and I run Dallas through the 17 motivations for linking I can probably expand my list a couple times over for possible communities to target.

Lets try it:

17 motivations for linking to “Hotel Excellent”

• Paying homage- if someone got there career started at Hotel Excellent or had the best night of sleep in their life
• Identifying methodology- if the management style was of a certain type
• Providing background- explaining the setting of a conference at Hotel Excellent
• Correcting- If Hotel Excellent did something not so excellent they might get a link from someone correcting what happened.
• Criticizing- Same as the above, but criticizing what happened.
• Authenticating claims- If someone said Hotel Excellent was in Austin, it could be authenticated that it is in Dallas
• Alerting to works soon to be published- Hotel Excellent could be soon doing a promotion
• Spreading the word on poorly disseminated work- a promotion that is not well known
• Identifying original concepts- If Hotel Excellent was the first to come up with the breakfast buffet
• Promoting one’s own authority- If someone asked what the best hotel in Dallas was, a certain blogger, wishing to show their own authoritative knowledge of Dallas might link to Hotel Excellent as the response
• Providing and immediate access mechanism to the subject in question- In discussing Hotel Excellent, someone might link at it.
• Providing a graphical image- if someone needed a picture of a hotel room, Hotel Excellent could get the link
• Acknowledging sponsors- If Hotel Excellent sponsored a conference
• Linking to business partners- If Hotel Excellent also ran B&B Excellent
• Linking to products or services purchased- If someone bought the honeymoon package they might link to information about it.
• Linking to clients- Hotel Excellent’s security provider might link to their website to show it as a client.
• Status symbols- If Hotel Excellent gave away badges to frequent guests or something maybe they would link to it.

Ok, so in no time at all I have a nice list of 17 possible areas to explore for people who might link to the Hotel Excellent website.

Now, as I run Dallas through that same list I could come up with the following

• Paying homage- Groups honoring Dallas citizens, famous people, or ideas that originated there
• Identifying methodology- Groups honoring famous methodology that is executed in Dallas
• Providing background- Groups talking about history and neighborhood overviews of Dallas
• Correcting- People correcting misinformation about Dallas
• Criticizing- People criticizing Dallas
• Authenticating claims- People trying to authenticate claims about Dallas facts
• Alerting to works soon to be published- Groups running upcoming breaking stories related to Dallas
• Spreading the word on poorly disseminated work- Groups trying to spread the word on Dallas events
• Identifying original concepts- and so on and so forth
• Promoting one’s own authority
• Providing and immediate access mechanism to the subject in question
• Providing a graphical image
• Acknowledging sponsors
• Linking to business partners
• Linking to products or services purchased
• Linking to clients
• Status symbols-

My list of possible ponds to fish in for links just doubled. If I ran the other related ideas through the list, it would be no time before I had over 100 areas to go searching for the linkerati that I might could target for links. By usiing the related concepts and 17 motivations for linking, I should be able to find layers and layers of potential link sources that just thinking about “hotels” would have never gotten me.

Two tools that comes up over and over again in people’s recommendations are Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Ranking. “How did you make that chart?”, “Oh, its easy with Advanced Link Manager’s link popularity graphs.” “How do you track link growth over time?” “Just use AWR”.The chorus goes on and on.

I dislike fluff in describing a product, but honestly, the word of mouth in the SEObook community about both of these software products is really impressive (especially because there are no affiliate links happening when it is discussed). After hearing people rant and rave about the tool, I thought I would take advantage of a promotion they were running offering a copy of the tools in exchange for a review.

Here have been my experiences with the tool. I will start with Advanced link manager.

One of the biggest problems I have faced as I try and help businesses grow their internet presence, is tracking website’s back links for growth, new communities to get involved in and checking in on competitors back links to see the methods they use. The Yahoo Site Explorer is a good tool, but the interface can take forever to sift through if you are dealing with anything more than a handful of links and it is impossible to keep track of link growth over time through the tool. I like Majestic SEO and highly recommend it, but its downfall is that the links it generates are often from several years ago and don’t exist on the web anymore. That said, I think Majestic gives the best quality link data available. Its just that you have to rummage through a lot of noise to find the jewels.

The immediate thing I liked about Advanced Link Manager is that it verifies which links are still in existence. So you can take the great data that Majestic SEO gives you, import it into Advanced Link Manager let the tool verify the live links and weed out the dead links and you have the best list of live links for your site, or a competitors site.

This feature seems helpful for starting with new clients and beginning the tedious task of studying who is already linking to them.

The second thing I noticed about Advanced Link Manager was the graphic display of link evolution over time. This is really helpful in that it allows for quick visualization of the success or failure of link cultivation over time. The fact that you can plot competitors and measure growth rates is a great feature in being able to show clients their own strengths and weaknesses and give them an idea of the effort they will need to invest to succeed.

The third handy feature is the ability to analyze link anchor text. The layout allows you to get a quick overview of what words people have used to link to the sites in question and allows you to see how people are referring to your site. Recently a business that I consult with asked, “We are doing well for so many key phrases, but why is our competition beating us on this one phrase. Why is that?” By analyzing the anchor text it was easy to show the client the huge amount of links the competition had built up using that one phrase of anchor text. Now this same feature is available with Majestic SEO, but because of all the noise in the back link data of Majestic, combining the two could be a great one-two punch.

I am including a big screen shot to give a clear view:

As for Advanced Web Ranking, it’s great at grinding out large amounts of website ranking data for clients. E-commerce sites, with whom I primarily work, want to keep track of lots and lots of keywords and see where they rank. Given the vast levels of traffic change that can occur with moving up or down a couple spots in the rankings, being able to import a huge list of keywords and have it return back the ranking positions will allow me to blow through those type of reports with ease.

Another great thing about AWR is the ability to track search engine ranking over time. For some of my clients certain keywords are really valuable for their business and to be able to show changes in rankings over time helps demonstrate the effectiveness of the campaigns we run.

Again, another large screen shot

You can also track rankings across search engines so you can see how your site is doing in Google, Yahoo or Bing.

As for critiques of the software, I do have a few. First, on Advanced Link Manager, the interface is a bit stiff. There are a lot of features, but I feel like they are thrown at you all at once and it seems a bit difficult to navigate. In addition, some of its focus on reciprocal link partners seems to promote an SEO tactic that was outdated several years ago. Overall though, I think it will become a regular tool in my tool belt.

As for Advanced Web Ranking, the biggest beef I have with it is one I don’t know if there is a solution to. Search Engines are doing so much personalization of search results as well as changing results based on user location, the SERPs can change drastically even within state, let alone trying to work with international clients. When using Advanced Web Rankings, I saw advertised a feature for monitoring rankings from different data centers, which would be a big help for me, but I was unable to find how to use that option with the actually software. It could just be my oversight, but nonetheless, the ability to check rankings from different data centers to me, is crucial and would be a make or break for me in using the software regularly.

I don’t have a good solution for this manually either, but I was hopeful that Advanced Web Ranking would be able to handle this feature.

The other posts in the series are:

• Overview of Finding the Linkerati
• Motivations for Linking (this post)
• Lateral Thinking.
• Search operators to find Linkerati.
• How to use directories like DMOZ, & Yahoo Directory to build links (and no I don’t mean being listed in them).
• How to use Social Media sites like Delicious and Digg to find the linkers.
• Studying the masters to find linking opportunities.

Why do some websites link to other websites? As people are predominately self-interested, what would make someone take the time to link and acknowledge someone else? Understanding these motivations can help link builders develop high quality, naturally given links which can both help rankings, drive interested traffic, establish authority and create business.

Old School Reasons for Citations

Scholars in the field of bibliometric literature have been studying changes and trends in the output of scholarly publications and literature for years. One of the areas they have tracked are reasons for citations in scholarly works. Now, given ink citations on paper pages in scholarly books in a library somewhere, may seem eons away from pixels and blogs, but what about the motivations behind the citations?

Several studies conducted found the following motivations behind the giving of citations in academic books:

• Paying homage
• Identifying methodology
• Providing background
• Correcting
• Criticizing
• Authenticating claims
• Alerting to works soon to be published
• Spreading the word on poorly disseminated work
• Identifying original concepts
• Promoting one’s own authority

Internet Citations

At the turn of the century, scholars turned some of their focus to studying why hyperlinks were given on the internet. In addition to the previously mentioned motivations, the scholars noted that the following were motivations in hyper linking between websites

• Providing and immediate access mechanism to the subject in question
• Providing a graphical image
• Acknowledging sponsors
• Linking to business partners
• Linking to products or services purchased
• Linking to clients

I think one other motivations to add to the list are is as follows:

• Status symbols- People are always looking for something or someone to validate who they are or what they do, and in turn want to use these status symbols to communicate their value to others. That is why badges like “Top 50 fill in the blank website”, Better Business Bureau Online Member, &  TripAdvisor’s Visitor’s Choice awards are highly linked items. Winners (the linkerati) can use them to validate their website/company/service etc to their own community.

So when you are looking for the linkerati for your product or service think about what types of websites you can be the fulfillment of some of the above motivations and you are sure to find the pockets of linkerati in your niche.