The following is the guest post by Brandon Hopkins

When it comes to ranking being first is the only thing that matters. Last month I had a site that has been ranked #2 for it’s main keyword move up to #1, want to see what the traffic was like? Check out the screenshot below.

As you can see from the picture the site went from about 130 to 900 visitors in one day. Early the next morning, the site moved back to #2 and had 319 visitors. For this small niche, ranking #1 is about 7x better than #2! So if anyone ever tells you “The top 10 is good enough!” or “If you can get into the top 3, you’ll be OK“, those people have no real experience with being #1. So what makes the difference between a #1 and a #2 ranked site? Links, of course.

Here is another screenshot showing the increase in links paralleling an increase in rankings.

As you can see, when I started working on this site around the beginning of February, the site was ranked in the top 10 and floated around for over a month. However, take a look at the total links, there was a continual and steady increase from about 150 total links to 1300 total links. Sure, you can go out and get some good directory links at Ezilon Web Directory and Best of the Web, but you need those and more!

Since I’ve stopped working on this site, the links will slowly decline a little as sites go offline or certain links get moderated. Overall, to keep a #1 ranking, you want to have links consistently going up.

Why Is Link Building Still a Numbers Game?

Let me tell you about my competitors. One is Amazon (160,000,000 incoming links, strong domain), one is a wikipedia entry, one is a 10 year old domain with 4.4 million incoming links (my domain is 3 years old), 4 of my competitors are the creators/manufacturers of the product I’m selling. I’m their affiliate, but I’m ahead of them!

So what makes the difference? Links to my target page. Here is the breakdown of the SERP’s and incoming links to the page.

1. 1230 (manufacturer)
2. 1120 (My site!)
3. 114 (10 year old domain, 4.4 domain links)
4. 64 (9 year old blog, 2 million domain links)
5. 35 (manufacturer)
6. 242 (manufacturer)
7. 0 (Amazon.com)
8. 5 (blog, 751,000 domain links)
9. 0 (Target.com)

See a pattern? The number one site has the most links, crazy to think that Google is telling us that it’s all about page load time and relevancy isn’t it. Looking at those stats, what do you think impacts SERP’s the most?

Brandon Hopkins works with companies around the world to provide website design and IT consulting services. You can contact him at his Fresno web design company.

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*This is a guest post by Will Harrison but it perfectly describes this blog attitude: LINK OUT GENEROUSLY*

Because this is a guest post, and although I do SEO work similar to Ann Smarty, all I ask is that if you find this article, contact her if you need SEO help. I just landed a job with a major company and I do not need any more clients at this point in time. I have linked to my website to provide information to those who thirst for knowledge, not to compete with Ann.

The beauty of this country is that people are free to believe and think whatever they want. If you don’t like someone’s advice, you have every right to ignore it completely regardless of if it is valuable and helpful. As an American or Canadian, you are allowed to be a free thinker and decide for yourself when you see, read, or hear something that is of value.

For those of you that are here reading this page with an open mind, you will likely learn something valuable and useful and for those of you that have your mind made up already, you can move on to reading some of those useless search engine optimization blogs out there.

You probably have already read countless blogs and articles about search engine optimization and found that one thing that significantly contributes to the direct success of search engine results is linking. Linking is what makes the Internet go ’round. I don’t want to get too in depth into what Google PageRank is all about in this article, but essentially PageRank is Google’s stock value of a website and part of how that value is determined is the quality of the links to that website. Although a website and a blog are completely different in my opinion for the purpose of this article, they are one in the same.

There are two types of linking, internal and external. Both are equally important to the success of a website. If an end user cannot navigate internally around your website easily, they will get frustrated and likely leave. If you direct them to other useful information on other websites, they will likely return to yours to find more helpful information.

How do you build links? What’s the best way to improve PageRank and increase linking to my website?

You have probably read that if you create good content the links will come, that’s partly true and partly untrue. There is tons of websites out there that have excellent content but nobody is linking to it. It is buried under thousands of Google search results and will likely never be found. Part of getting good content recognized is through networking. If you say to a few people, “HEY! LOOK AT THIS!”, and they read it and like it, they will hopefully: PASS IT ON. If you are the kind of person who is constantly screaming, “HEY! LOOK AT THIS!”, then you may likely be ignored like the boy who cried wolf.

Part of getting links to your website is by giving links out to other websites. As you see, I used the anchor text “the boy who cried wolf” to link to the story about the boy who kept crying out to get attention, only to finally be ignored when he actually had something important to say. I have written several hundred articles and pages of information over the last year and think my TOP 10 articles are the only ones I would want to constantly promote or have people link to.

I now have more than five years in the SEO industry and have found that getting quality websites with good PageRank to link to your content can be nearly impossible at times. I have tried to network with webmaster, after webmaster, after webmaster, only to be shot down continuously. It can be extremely discouraging knowing that many people that own websites are link hogs and suffering from PageRank greed. The first rule in life is: NEVER GIVE UP. At some point, someone will grant you an opportunity to network with them, and carpe diem. Networking with competitors and people in your line of work can go much farther than succumbing to PageRank greed and being a link hog.

There is a  faux phenomenon known as “leaking PageRank” is an urban legend. Websites do not leak Page Rank, I don’t care what you have read or where you have read it, it simply is untrue. You do not lose PR because you link to another website. In fact, I have done some experimenting and have found that the opposite is true. If you wrote an article and linked to 5 web pages that each had a Page Rank of 7 of more, you would likely get a small fraction of that Page Rank returned to your page for linking to high quality sites even if you had no incoming links. Linking to pages with Page Ranks of 4 of more can be beneficial to you because you are letting Google know that you are linking to quality websites.

Linking is essential to the success of a website. However, playing fair and following Google’s “Rules of the Road” is more important than the links themselves. Matt Cutts states on his blog, “–the best links are earned and given by choice.” Google’s webmaster guidelines states, “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.” It is made clear on how NOT to get links, but very few webmasters are able to find people to link to them, because they fail to network.

Hey, if you read and  like this article, link to it. Link to it to help people realize what a great site SEO Smarty is and to provide people with more information. Information is the key to success in life, not money. Don’t link to it because I asked you to, link to it because you found value in the information in it just like I linked to the various websites that contained other useful information for the readers. Who knows, you might even get some Page Rank back in return, right?

Post image by by P/\UL

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With link bait, the first important thing is inspiration, then comes an idea. There is no way you can brainstorm something really good without being inspired. This quick post actually aims at inspiring you: I hope it works.

There are many types of link baiting content; they have one thing in common: none of them is 100% working. Even with some solid investment, brilliant idea and good implementation, you can never be sure it works as well as you expected.

This is why to get the feel of what a link bait actually is, I’d recommend to start with something rather simple but fun:

• Timely link bait is usually easier to promote;
• Timely link bait doesn’t have to be anything fancy to be well received.

Need an example to get inspired? I have three for you.

1. Get Rid of RipOffReport from the SERPS

Remember those endless discussions about how RipOffReport is unfairly ranked too high by Google, how it allows fake negative reports which spoil the reputation of good businesses?

It was a great time for Distilled to launch a campaign encouraging people to “to have Google do something about these shake-downs.”

They also had the set of pretty badges for people to show off their support:

Isn’t it genius?

2. Bring Back Links

Too much talking about how people “vote” by linking to other pages, how linking can bring your competitors above you in SERPs and how links “to bad neighborhoods” can get you into trouble has had one logical outcome: people no more want to link out at all.

Another reason why people don’t link any more is microblogging: “suddenly everyone stopped linking to each other and began sharing stuff on Twitter.”

What a perfect timing for someone to create a campaign to bring links back which is exactly what Danny Cooper did:

And yes, I joined

3. SEMMY Awards NON-Nominee

SEMMY Awards honoring best content on various Internet Marketing topics have been a great success this year. Many were nominated, but most people weren’t.

So what a great idea to honor that “unlucky” majority by creating a fun badge for them?

None of the above examples is absolutely unique or has some never-heard-before concept behind it. But they are still cool because they reflect the thoughts of many people in the industry and thus are doomed to positive response.

Now, has this post inspired you to create some simple, topical and timely link bait? Share your ideas in the comments! I promise to help everyone who decided to have some link baiting fun after reading this post.

Img by Aaron_M

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The following is the the first post in the series of guest blogging success stories. The series is dedicated to my new venture My Blog Guest, the community of guest bloggers. I am building the site where you can build links and your brand completely for free and by providing real quality, so go ahead: join, participate and help me build it!

The guest post was provided by Glen Allsopp, a talented writer and a well-known blogger who has been building his name by guest blogging.

When I go at new things, I go at them full-force. Naturally, I only take on projects that I’m very passionate about, so the ones I do take on get my absolute attention. When I started a brand new blog mid-way through 2008, things were no different.

The blog I was starting would probably be best defined as a member of the ‘personal development’ niche. A site that helps people with life struggles, productivity, motivation and things like time-management. Something that I was very interested in at the time.

Although I classed myself as a very good internet marketer, I was a total nobody in the personal development niche. I had a new blog and no audience. I decided that instead of going down the usual methods of blog promotion I would try a new strategy to get myself more readers: write blog posts for other sites.

Guest Posts

Guest posts make total sense and provide a winning situation for multiple parties. First of all, the blogger who is accepting a guest post on their site gets free, quality content for their audience. The audience of that blog gets great content to read. The writer of the article gets a link from the post and potentially new subscribers on their site.

As long as the post is of a high quality, everybody wins.

People have been advocating the benefits of guest posting for years, and it’s nothing new. But these people usually recommend it on a small scale. I had the idea of guest posting thanks to Leo Babauta from Zen Habits who claimed that it helped him grow his site so quickly. (I think it was the 50+ digg homepages, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt).

I started writing. And I wrote some more. I took a break. And then continued to write. Instead of writing a post a month or even a post a week, I wrote 2-3 every single week. I wrote more guest posts than anyone else I had ever seen writing them, and things were going well.

Subscribers were up massively, traffic was up, and the links back to the website were now in the thousands. Guest blogging was really taking off for me. In the space of a few months I had written nearly 40 individual guest posts for other websites and was now enjoying a feed count of over 4,000 subscribers.

A Five-Figure Income

I don’t like to reveal exactly how much money I make, but through blogging alone in 2009 I made well over $50,000. This is completely through blog that was built from scratch; not any of the other sites I run. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if I had not written one guest post in the last 12 months, that figure would be more like $10,000-$20,000.

You see, I think there really is no effective way to market a blog these days. I mean, you can spend hours interacting on forums or blog comments and hoping to get a few clicks. Or, you can spend an hour writing a quality article that shows a brand new audience what you’re about a get both links and traffic to your site.

To me it was a no-brainer, so I kept the strategy going.

In fact, this worked so well that guest posts on some sites would send me over 400 subscribers. That’s right, one article could really increase my feed count so much. Do this on the scale I was doing things, and you start to see how I became successful.

Now that you’ve seen the power of guest posting, let me share some final tips.

Tips from My Experience

Based on everything I have learned over the past year, I just have three main points to make:

• Vary Your Posting: Some people just focus on the biggest sites and that’s it. Instead, I wrote for the ’small fish’ and the ‘big guys’. Both improve the number of backlinks to your site and you never know when a small fish could become a great contact or even a big fish.
• Send it and See: Most people think it’s not only polite but also ‘right’ to ask a blog author if they like a blog post idea first before sending it. I definitely think it is more polite, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best thing to do. Instead, in my experience, I have simply wrote articles I think other bloggers would like and I send it to them. Then they can clearly say yes or no with the content in front of them.
• Accept Rejection: If someone doesn’t want you to write on their site or they don’t like the content you’ve wrote, just accept it. There have been plenty of sites who didn’t think my work was good enough for them, yet Technorati Top 100 blogs that loved my writing. Rejection doesn’t mean anything about you specifically as a person, so just accept it with grace and move on.

So, you still don’t think guest blogging is ineffective, do you?

This article was written by Glen Allsopp who blogs about Viral Marketing. As you can see, he is a big advocate of guest posting.

Got a guest blogging success story? Send it to me and I’ll spread the word! seosmarty@gmail.com

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I love original and unique ideas that promote themselves. Creating content that spreads is art and you are unable to generate dozens of unique and catchy ideas weekly: sometimes a person creates something truly unique once in a lifetime.

Still, there are some tactics behind crafting something that becomes viral. One such tactic is making fake mini websites that feature some sensation or weird concepts.

Those websites create their own imaginary world around them (for example, describe the life in a non-existent country) or share some spoofed scientific research or experiments or claim to describe an event that never happened, etc.

The best thing about those sites is that they don’t require much time or effort and are eagerly shared. Very often all you need is to contact a power blogger or even a journalist and share your hoax and it will work like a charm.

Let’s have a look at just a few examples to get an idea and inspiration:

Brand it:

Notice how the Onion, the weekly “satirical” stream of fake news, brand their video category: the logo, video watermarks, and the overall design are CNN-styled. This trick already makes their stream viral:

Make it easy to believe:

Male Pregnancy, the official site dedicated to the first male pregnancy, is a great example of how to design a hoax site. Everything here testifies for the reliability of this “scientific experiment”: video documentary, online EKG, magazine cover, etc.

Brainstorm a sticky concept

Some ideas don’t even require any design work or time to develop. Look at Internet First Page and Internet Last Page for example: all they needed was an idea and the domain name for that, and here we go a nice naturally-linked page to transfer link juice wherever you need:

Another cool example: turnofftheinternet.com

Grab a sensational domain

Sometimes a domain is what makes a website spread. A great example of that is PetsORFood.com for the site that claims to deliver exotic animals (like baby seals) meat to American dinner tables. The domain speaks for itself and provokes emotions by combining two “uncombineable” concepts that do not fit together: pets who we love dearly and food which we eat:

Post image by Capture Queen ™

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I for one am too tired of “linkbaiting” titles (ala “XX lists”, rants or how-tos). In an effort to find examples of some creative titles I’ve been browsing hot Digg posts and the most viral celebrity blog I am aware of – Perez Hilton – to spot some linguistic and semantic tactics behind linkbait:

1. Abbreviations – using popular abbreviation reflecting either slang or professional jargon vocabulary:

2.  Playing with antonyms (words with opposite semantic meanings), e.g. substituting a word in a well known (or set) phrases with its antonym:

3.  Playing with colloquialisms (a word or phrase that is used in casual / informal conversation):

4.  Using oxymoron – combining what normally cannot be combined (e.g. poor and rich):

5.  Playing with homophones (words with a different origin and meaning but having the same pronunciation) or using “pun” – deliberately mixing two similar-sounding words:

6.  Incomplete sentence (i.e. “you guess what should follow“):

7.  Lexical “distortion” – often used in slang – creating new words by intentionally incorrect word spelling:

8.  Semantic “distortion” (somewhat related to #2) – substituting one word in a set phrase with any other word for comic / unexpected meaning:

9.  Playing with neologisms (i.e. creating new words):

10.  Creating words that have two meanings and can be interpreted in two (often opposing) ways:

11.  Question-answer play: asking and instantly answering a question:

12.  Repetition: intentional usage of one and the same word twice:

Post image: fish cartoon

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The Internet is changing rapidly. What seemed to work fine only a few months ago, can now have no effect at all. Thus the skills of an SEO expert cannot be limited to tactics which proved to work for years. Continuous learning and modifying your strategies is a key to a successful SEO campaign.

Low effective old-fashioned link building techniques (don’t try this at home ):

1. Make the list of websites linking to your most successful competitor and try to submit your link in each directory, forum, etc you managed to find.

Disadvantage: these tactics might be old and low effective.

2. Make the list of websites linking to your most successful competitor and email each: “I have visited your website and would like to buy a link/exchange links with you… bla bla bla.”

Disadvantage: with the huge amount of unsolicited emails of this kind webmasters receive daily, your email will most probably be deleted.

3. Find an influential blogger in your niche and send him an email: “Hi! I have visited your blog and would like to buy a sponsored review.. bla bla bla.”

Disadvantage: respectful and popular bloggers who care about their reputation are most likely to decline your offer. Besides, today even non-authoritative bloggers tend to outlink with high reluctance as by being suspected of selling links or blog posts they risk being punished by Google.

Now consider these new more effective ways to build back links to your website:

1. Find a comparatively new but already well-known website in your niche and try to research its link building strategy.

Advantages: * as this site is new and already popular, you will learn the techniques which work today (not a year ago); * a new site is most likely to have fewer links than an established one, so it’s link building scheme will be clear and this will save your time.

2. Make up the list of websites where you would like to get a link and try to find some alternative ways to contact them (find forums, social networks and blogs where they participate and try to reach them there).

Advantage: * people tend to trust their friends via social networking websites; so your message is likely to be attended with attention and consideration. (Further reading on this approach: “Creating and Managing Your Link Campaign” by Crash)

3. Define influential bloggers in your niche and ask for a guest post.

Advantages: * you will get noticed by the prominent blogger by contributing unique valuable content to his website; * plenty of daily readers of the authoritative blog where your guest post will be published will start visiting and trusting your website. Thus you will build faithful readership and reputation.

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I am sure that most of you already know and use the following search operators when planning an SEO campaign. But from my own experience, you don’t often use even what you are well aware of just because things tend to slip your mind. So that’s rather a reminder of the tools search engines kindly offer us and how they can be effectively used.

1. Use keyword site:domain.com to find most relevant inner pages on the site where you might want to get a link back.

Note: compare Google and Yahoo results, or just go to SearchBoth.net to see both on one page. Say I’d like a link from seomoz.org with the anchor text “viral marketing”, so I’ll type in viral marketing site:seomoz.org in SearchBoth.net and see what pages are believed most relevant by the two search engines:

2. Find who mentions and links to your competitor:

http://*.yourcompetitordomain.com

To filter the results from your competitor’s website use this combination (also should be done both in Google and Yahoo):

http://*.yourcompetitordomain.com -site:yourcompetitordomain.com

Note: to learn your competitor’s most recent techniques, take advantage of Google advanced search. For example, most recently indexed pages linking back or mentioning SEOMoz.org (past one week):

http://*.seomoz.org past one week

(an important update: even more about this technique at SEOMoz.org blog)

3. Find out even more about your competitors’ link building techniques: learn how relevant their back links are – maybe you can do better?

related:yourcompetitordomain.com command will show your competitor’s backlinks neighborhood.

4. Learn what is your website indexing rate:

Past one day:
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.YOURSITE.com&as_qdr=d

Past one week:
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.YOURSITE.com&as_qdr=w

Past one month:
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.YOURSITE.com&as_qdr=m

Past 2 months:
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.YOURSITE.com&as_qdr=m2

Past 3 months:
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.YOURSITE.com&as_qdr=m3

Past 6 months:
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.YOURSITE.com&as_qdr=m6

Or just let this handy tool calculate your site index rate for you.

This Google and Yahoo Search Engine Query Cheat Sheet is also very helpful.

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By the recent PR crackdown Google has made it quite clear that paid links can harm both the publisher’s and advertiser’s websites. They can negatively impact a site’s PR and ranking in SERP. But the problem is that paid links are not so easy to identify. If done carefully they may remain invisible even to a human being. So if Google chooses to continue its anti paid link building campaign, it is speculated that it can completely devalue inbound links as the trust building factor using website internal stats (Google Analytics, feedburner, etc) instead. But would this be easy possible to do? My answer is no. And here are my reasons:

1. Using Google Analytics Traffic Value to measure website popularity. High traffic can be even easier manipulated than incoming links. People had started to buy and sell traffic even before they started to buy and sell links. And superficial traffic (with no actual people landing) requires even less effort – hm, an old story.

2. Using Google Analytics Number of Pages Factor. The obvious formula is like this: the more, the better, e.g. the more pages one visitor looks through, the more he is likely to be interested in and the more valuable the resource appears. Well, not quite that – what if the resource does not require any reading and browsing? What if it is designed the way that the visitor finds what he is looking for instantly? Isn’t that even better from the user’s perspective, than above? So this factor cannot be used as the measure of the website value (the same refers to the Time On Site, and Bounce Rate, by the way). Googlers themselves confirm, these numbers are too controversial to serve as the website value measurement.

3. Using Number of Subscriptions of Feedburner Stats. Well, this one can really measure the resource value but can only be applied to blogs.

So my verdict here is as follows: Google will continue using incoming links to measure a website value and to filter the search results. Link structure is the Internet essence; to devalue it would mean the whole web revolution. So I would not expect these global changes to happen in the nearest future…

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