The Maine SEO Blog

About a week and a half ago, I attended a MarketingProfs webinar with SEO and link building gurus Stephan Spencer and Eric Ward.  The presentation itself was called “Link Building for Online Publicity, Buzz & SEO – What’s New & What’s Tried and True”.

Here is a sampling of my notes, basically the major things I pulled from the presentation (most of which I either did not know or Stephan and Eric simply solidified).

• It’s not all about the SEO and PageRank. It’s about driving qualified traffic; there are other quality links (many that have no SEO value at all) that you should go after:
  - Directory links (DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory)
  - Temporary buzz links (Digg)
  - Paid-for links (Eric gave the example of Adbrite)
  - Vertical links
  - Email-based links
  - Links from blogs
  - Editorial links
  - Organic links
• Finding vertical/topical links:
  - searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html
  - searchenginecolossus.com
  - Google (search for “seo search engine”)
• 301 redirects pass link juice; 302’s do not.
• Tips for requesting links:
  - Subject line is the most important, letting the webmaster or blogger know that you are not a spammer.  Make it personal and use the title of their site.
  - Make the email short and sweet, again letting the webmaster/blogger know you’re not a spammer.  Link to a specific page (preferably NOT the homepage) and why/how it would interest their audience.
  - Include a brief overview of what the site is all about – don’t make your potential linker do all the work!
• Tips for link reclamation (in other words, what to do if your URLs change):
  - Identify these useless links in your Google Webmaster Tools
  - Contact linking sites
  - 301 redirect
• Tips for updating link text (in other words, getting backlinks to change anchor text from “click here” to something a little more relevant and keyword rich):
  - Review existing backlinks with a backlink analyzer (something like Linkscape from SEOmoz)
  - If the keywords you’re targeting are NOT in the anchor text, consider contacting the webmaster/blogger (using the same sort of technique as requesting links).
• Check how PageRank is flowing and if you have an error codes with a Server Header Checker (search for Google and use one of the top 10).
• Track link building efforts with tools:
  - trackengine.com
  - changenotes.com
  - google.com/alerts
  - urlywarning.net
  - changedetect.com

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Expert Advice, Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.