Please do not use this list to do blog spamming with. If you are going to comment on these blogs, it shouldn’t purely be for the purpose of increasing your PageRank and incoming links. You should only make worthwhile comments to these blogs!

Go check out The D List and be a part of the link love!

Blogs are supposed to be about user interaction, and link building is a huge portion of SEO, so why not spread the link love?

PLACES TO SUBMIT

Directories – There are many directories out there that you can submit your site to, some are free, many require a reciprocal link and/or fee. While free is always a great thing, some of the paying ones may be worth it depending on the PageRank of the site and if the fee gets you a lifetime link. Reciprocals are generally not my cup of tea, because most of the time they want the link to appear on the page you want them to link to (usually your homepage). I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my homepage cluttered with a bunch of links to outside directories. It used to be thought that reciprocal links weighed more heavily than one-way links, but that theory was just that…

You can submit to these directories by hand, one at a time, or you can pay someone else to do it. There are many services out there which will coordinate and implement link building campaigns for your site. Some are actually done by hand, others are done by a computer. I would be very careful of these services though. Make sure there is some way you can approve of which sites your link will be put on so you can look out for some of the things I detailed below.

Don’t forget the biggies like Yahoo (now requires a fee) and DMOZ if you can actually find an editor that still exists there…

Text Link Ads – While this can be looked at by some as a ‘grey hat’ technique, I have seen amazing results first hand by using paid text link ads. You get to choose the actual site that the ad is shown on and can specify the link text as well. These link brokers will give you details on the site like their Alexa ranking, PageRank, etc. They are categorized by Industry/Topic and the monthly fee is detailed as well. Generally the ads start at $10-15 per month and go way up from there. It pays to ’shop around’ because some times you can get bargains on PR4s and 5s in the $15 range! Text-Link-Ads.com is currently having a special where they are giving away $100 in FREE links, how can you go wrong?? It’s definitely worth a test to see how well it can boost your rankings for a targeted keyword phrase but I can tell you firsthand from testing with many different clients, if done properly you will see results!

Posting on Content Sites (Blogs, Forums, CraigsList, etc.) – Sometimes referred to as viral marketing, blog outreach, etc., posting on various content sites can produce results if done properly. Please keep in mind that most of these will not have any effect on PageRank as many of these types of sites have nofollow tags, and some have dynamic pages that don’t get indexed by search engines. However, they can help build an audience, get targeted traffic (locally targeted in the case of Craigslist), and if you have quality content can entice others to link to your site (link baiting).

IMPORTANT THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR

• PageRank – be sure to check the PageRank of the site that you are obtaining a link on using the Google Toolbar. I know, I know, the data used by the Google Toolbar is outdated, blah blah blah. I still find it to be a quick and easy way to get some information on a site. The better the PageRank site linking to you, the better it can and will boost your PageRank.
• Relevancy – a link from a site that is relevant to yours is more powerful than a link from a generic site, plain and simple.
• Indexed/Banned – make sure the page linking to you is indexed in Google. If it’s not indexed, it will be of no help to you and could even harm you if they are not indexed because they were banned. The quality of the site linking to you ultimately has a reflection on the quality of your site in the eyes of the engines. It’s kind of like how it is in real life – sometimes we are judged by the group of people we hang out with…
• NoFollow – check to be sure the links they are posting do not have the nofollow attribute in the anchor tag. Just do a ‘view source’ and check for something similar to the code excerpt below. If this exists, it is telling the engine not to follow through to your site when they index the page – not good..

• Link text – this is the absolute key thing that people seem to often overlook. The text of the actual link is EXTREMELY important in helping boost your site’s ranking for a targeted keyword/phrase. If your company’s site is ACME Inc. and you sell widgets, you want the link text to read ‘Widgets’ not ‘ACME Inc.’. If you are targeting multiple keyphrases, you will need to pick one that is underperforming and you are looking to rank better for and use that as the link text. While we’re on the subject, it is important to note that link text matters in not only external links but internal links as well.
• Good content – this really is a no brainer, but if you want any chance of a buzz arround your site you need to fill it with quality content. If your site lacks content that is informative related to your product or service, people will not link to it.

I hope this helps as a starting point and feel free to come back with any questions. I plan to dive into these various link building strategies more deeply in the future.

So, what is Internet Marketing? Just like any other term thrown around the Internet, it has lots of different meanings but here is the basic definition as I see it: “To use multiple online techniques to drive traffic to a user friendly web site where the desired conversion can be obtained”. That’s the bottom line right, to bring people to a site and get them to take action?

Here are some of the topics I plan to talk about over the coming days/months/years:

• Traffic – various techniques to drive traffic to a web site, whether you are looking for relevant traffic or in some cases, eyeballs alone.
• Conversion – how to analyze and optimize a site’s performance to drive the highest rate of conversion possible (sales, leads, etc.)
• Analysis – what are the definitions of the key metrics, how they can be viewed to get a total picture of a site’s performance, various tools out there like Google Analytics on up to more expensive players like Omniture.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – the basics of proper SEO- it’s really not rocket science but it is ever changing. I will layout the formula for a ’search engine friendly’ web site.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) / Search engine marketing (SEM) – another one of those names that is in a state of transition. I’m old school, I still call it PPC! I will talk about how to build out and optimize campaigns, techniques on driving the lowest cost per conversion (CPC), what the new Google Quality Score really means, etc.
• Link building – various ways to obtain links, both paid and unpaid, the good ‘ole PageRank and how important it is, etc.
• Social networking/Web 2.0 – how can this be integrated into an Internet Marketing campaign, how effective or ineffective can be…
• General site auditing – how to quickly determine the issues with a site that effect it’s ability to get indexed, it’s ability to convert, etc.
• Ethics of SEO – black hat, white hat… How about grey hat? Learn about some of the grey areas in SEO that are currently up for debate (Text link ads, Blog outreach, etc.)
• News – if you know anything about this industry you know it is constantly changing – I’ll try to post newsworthy items on here as well.

Most of all, I look forward to interacting with people and discussing some of the hot issues in the industry.

All the best,

Brian