Conference Buddies

SMX Advanced – Seattle, WA – June 2008
Topic:  Blow Your Mind Link Building Tips

Here are some typical but top Directories where you should get links from:

DMOZ.org = http://www.dmoz.org/
Best of the Web = http://botw.org/
Yahoo Directory & Search = http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Joe Ant = http://www.joeant.com/
Blog Catalog = http://www.blogcatalog.com/

EDU Link Building
All conference speakers talking about link building tell you .GOV and .EDU are the best links to get.   For .GOV you have to be “special”.   But for .EDU you can get listed on various pages that lists resources, links, or favorites.   But to find these sites that accept links is tricky.   However this SMX session provided some link love secrets:

This is to find all the pages that has a links page within a certain school.edu site:
linkdomain:nameofwebsiteorschoolhere.com site:.edu “links”

For all websites within a school domain, that have a links page:

site:.edu “links”

Note that “links” can also be replaced with any common text that a link page might have, such as “bookmarks”, “resources”, “favorites”, “favorite sites”, “websites” or your products, services or industry.

Viral Marketing:
Creation of widgets, blog templates, sponsorship of templates, contests, and content syndication are ways that create massive buzz and links to your website.  If you create a useful free tool or content, many people will end up linking to you naturally.

Other Areas of Link Building:
Commenting on Blogs is great way to get a link back to your website.   Be sure that the website does not have the “nofollow” rule on, which does not let Search Engine spiders follow links out of their website.

On the flip side, if you write a useful article or information, many bloggers will tend to link to you naturally. Make sure you track this with a pingback or trackback. 

According to Wikipedia:
A Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as WordPress, Movable Type, Typo and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pingedwhen the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback.

A Pingback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software, such as Movable Type, WordPress and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published.

A Linkback is a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. The three methods (Refback, Trackback, and Pingback) differ in how they accomplish this task.

Here are a couple other tools mentioned that help with tracking links:

http://www.seomoz.org/backlink-analysis/

http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/

Here’s one tool not mentioned in the seminar, but has great uses in Google:
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Other Conference Comments:
There was also specific discussion whether or not reciprocal and paid links are dead in terms of SEO score.   It’s a fact that reciprocal links still provide a good score for anchor text / keyword link score.  However, 1 way links are weighted much higher than reciprocal links.   As long as you make your quest for links look natural as it was suppose to be then you should be fine i.e. many businesses find links for the sake of having relevant direct users come visit your website.

With paid links, they are also still valid, however, Matt Cutts one of the key search developers at Google is on a mission to reduce “link spam”.   So use paid links sparingly, asking yourself the question, “will this link bring me valid traffic to my website”.   If you answer yes, then it’s worth getting.   And as long as you have a business purpose, then it will look natural and you will gain link score.

… the bottom line is to use your common sense!!!