With the help of my good friend Gerald Weber (the_gman) and a consistent creation of content for guest blogging, article distribution, and press release marketing, I’ve started to see some truly amazing results. I’m in the top 5 for many of the targeted keywords, and I’m close to getting top 10 rankings on some keywords I thought I had a snowball’s chance in hell of ranking this high for.

And while it would be easy to pat myself on the back and take my foot off the gas pedal, the truth is I still have a long way to go. When it comes to link building, the battle is never really over.

Why?

1. You can always climb higher—I don’t know about you, but I’m sure as heck not ranking #1 for every keyword I’m targeting. And I never will be. That’s the point though. There is always room to go up. Sure, the higher you get, the harder that climb will be, but if you don’t keep building links and implementing sound SEO tactics, you’ll get stuck or even start to slide down.
2. There are more keywords to rank for—I’m doing really well with a handful of keywords, but I know there are many other keywords I should be focusing on achieving better rankings for. There are always other keywords to target. Some new keywords may have even popped up since the last time you did your research due to changing industries or new consumer behavior.
3. The people behind you want your spot—The higher you get in the search rankings, the bigger the bull’s-eye on your back becomes. There will always be people behind you who are trying to surpass you in the SERPs. And if you take your foot off the gas, they’re going to get by you eventually.
4. Current links may go away—That link you got from the PR 5 blog yesterday? It could disappear in the future if the blogger decides he’s tired of blogging and wants to shut down his site. Links come and go. That’s why you need to keep getting new, high-quality links on a consistent basis.
5. The search engines love relevance—The goal of the search engine is to provide searchers with the most relevant, up to date results possible. If the search engine sees you haven’t had links coming in in a long time, your website could be viewed as irrelevant or less useful. Continuous link building helps you stay relevant.
6. Algorithm changes could shake up your rankings—Finally, you never know when Google is going to switch up its algorithm. Ranking factors could change, and you could find yourself needing to do more work to climb back to the top.

How do you keep finding new ways to get links?

So, just why do PR gurus frown on this practice? Here are 4 reasons SEO press release distribution has earned a negative reputation.

1. SEO press releases are typically stuffed with keywords—Take a look at any free press release distribution directory. You’ll likely find a lot of press releases with awkward headlines and difficult to read copy. Why? Because the people distributing these press releases are only concerned with targeting specific keywords to help boost their search engine presence. The result is keyword-stuffed press releases that are anything but legitimate news.
2. Many choose quantity over quality—Because the links from press release directories don’t carry a lot of authority, marketers are forced to get huge volumes of these links if they want to see any results. As a result, they end up pushing one awful press release after another, hoping that eventually all the keyword targeting and link building will amount to something.
3. Links usually don’t add to the story—SEO press release distribution is usually all about link building. So, these press releases are littered with keyword-rich links pointing at various pages on the company’s website. The problem is the links are usually placed in there just for the sake of squeezing them in, rather than to add to the story by directing readers to quality content that supplements the news.
4. SEO press releases don’t usually end up in the hands of the media—The biggest reason PR people look down on SEO press release distribution is because most marketers just publish the press releases on free directories and leave it at that. They never make an effort to get their press releases in the hands of journalists, bloggers, podcasters, and other influencers. If they did, they may find their stories would get spread a lot further, and they’d enjoy even more benefits from their press release distribution strategy.

Personally, I see and agree with all of the points made by my PR friends. The SEO press release has become like the online article that gets bounced around from directory to directory. However, I don’t think that it has to be like this. I think you can achieve a healthy balance by writing quality optimized press releases and distributing them more efficiently.

Recently, I came across a really cool tool that’s designed to help all bloggers come up with linkbait ideas for their blog. The tool is called Linkbait Generator.  The way it works is you enter your own subject into the box, and you click “submit” to generate linkbait. Just keep clicking the “generate” button to get more and more headline ideas for your blog.

Here’s an example. I entered the subject “dog training.” Here are some of the linkbait ideas that this tool generated:

• The 7 most controversial videos of all time about dog training
• 10 ways people have gotten rich exploiting dog training
• 5 amazing things you probably didn’t know about dog training
• 6 shockingly evil things about dog training
• 5 insane but true things about dog training

You can go on and on generating ideas, but you get the point. I’ll say that I’m pretty impressed with some of the ideas this tool generates. I could see any of the above topics working as a successful piece of linkbait if written and promoted properly.

Now, there is something you should know when using the tool. Not all of the headlines it generates will be great. In fact, there are some that just won’t be relevant to what you do at all, but the majority of them are pretty good.

The whole point of this tool is to show you some of the proven styles of linkbait. The truth is there are certain types of headlines and ways to phrase things that gives a blog post a better chance of getting hot. So, even if you don’t end up using any of the ideas this tool generates, I still think it’s good for putting you in the right frame of mind for coming up with successful linkbait.

Give it a try. Check out Linkbait Generator and let us know if it works for you.

1. No keywords in your anchor text—There’s nothing worse than getting a high quality backlink that has completely useless anchor text like “click here” or just your actual web address. It’s crucial that you build keyword-rich back links. Why? Because the keywords in these links tell the search engines (and humans for that matter) what the target page is about. As a result, keyword-rich backlinks can improve your page’s search rank for the terms being linked.
2. Getting links from low-quality websites—Whenever you get links from websites that are viewed as spammy or that have bad reputations, you become associated with them. Some people call it hanging out in a bad neighborhood. If you’re connected with a bunch of low-grade websites, the search engines will start to see you in the same light as those websites. So, watch who you hang out with.
3. Focusing on quantity instead of quality—I’ve always said that I’d take 10 quality links over 100 bad ones every time. Sure, quantity does matter, but link building isn’t strictly a numbers game. If all your links are from low-grade websites, they won’t carry much weight, and much of your link building efforts will be wasted. Instead, focus on getting links from relevant, trusted websites.
4. Ignoring websites with a low PR—Too many link builders get too caught up with trying to get links only from websites with a high Page Rank. This is a bad idea for many reasons. See, PR isn’t everything. Just because a site has a low PR doesn’t mean it’s a bad website. Remember, a website that has a 0 PR today could have a 5 PR a year from now.
5. Not linking out—You have to give if you want to receive. You can’t expect everyone to link to you if you never link out to anybody. And whatever you do, don’t buy into the myth that you lose link juice whenever you link out. That’s BS. Linking out will attract links in return, and it helps you build your network with other bloggers.

What are some other costly link building mistakes? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

First, internal linking can enhance the experience for your readers. For example, let’s suppose you’re writing a post about important steps for maintaining your computer. In one of the steps, you might mention something about keeping your virus protection up to date. Here, you could link to a more expansive previous post you had written detailing the steps for picking out virus protection software, keeping it up to date, running it regularly, etc.

For readers, having this link to a previous related post can help them learn more about topics they’re interested in, enhancing the education they receive from your blog. Additionally, having this link in your post keeps readers on your blog for a longer period of time. The longer someone sticks around on your blog, the likelier it is that they’ll subscribe to your blog and become a loyal reader.

Beyond enhancing the user experience, a sound internal linking structure is good for search engine optimization. You probably already know that keyword-rich links from other websites help the search engines more accurately classify the pages on your website, thus increasing your search rankings for relevant keywords. Well, the same concept applies to internal linking on your website. Use keyword-rich links to old posts to help give them a boost in their search engine placement.

Now, when linking internally on your blog, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

1. Don’t overdo it—Okay, so internal linking in your blog can be beneficial, but you need to be careful not to overdo it. I’ve come across more than a few blogs that literally include 5-10 internal links in every single post. That’s just too much. If you have a link in every other sentence, you need to dial things down a notch. Also, don’t make the mistake of constantly linking to sales pages from your blogs. Your readers won’t enjoy the constant pitches.
2. Always use keyword-rich anchor text—To maximize the SEO benefits of internal linking, you should always use keyword-rich anchor text. Make sure the keywords in the anchor text are relevant to the page you’re linking to.
3. Help lower-ranking pages—If there are pages on your blog that aren’t performing well in the search engines, try to link to them whenever it makes sense to do so. Over time, internal links to low-performing pages could increase their presence in the search engines.

Do you use internal linking in your blog? How has it helped? Share your thoughts in the replies.

Feedage.com is a categorized and searchable RSS feed directory. It’s further explained that their goal is to categorize and organize large numbers of RSS data feeds to make viewing them more easier for end users. The directory was created and grown by adding RSS feeds into queue. Machine readable pages are then created off the partial item syndication of each RSS feed queued. In other words, when a new RSS feed is added into their directory, a new webpage is created that syndicates the partial feed of each entry.

The problem that I have with Feedage.com is that syndicated content is being used to display contextual based ads. This is nothing new, and in fact, many site do this. However, many blog authors and site owners take offense to other people using their content to earn revenue.

And then there are some sites such as Digg.com, don’t necessarily syndicate content, but instead monetize the user submitted content that is geared towards introducing a full story. That then creates a deterrence towards allowing people to actually click and view the story. This method is more accepted and tolerated, especially when sites such as Digg.com deliver traffic to the source site.

In the case with sites such as Feedage.com, majority are considered spam, splog, or sponge sites. That is of course is until the site in question is proven to generate incoming traffic to the source site. And that is where I am at with Feedage.com. This site syndicates the RSS feeds from blogs and uses the content to overly saturate pages with contextual based ads. Also, and in many cases with newer blogs, Feedage.com can rob source sites from their position in search engines. Since Feedage.com is more established than many of the source blogs its content is originating, many of the cases, the Feedage.com page will rank better than the source page.

Having that said, you might then question whether it’s worth submitting your RSS feed into their directory. Many people obviously would feel like it’s not. However, before a decision is made, there are a two benefits towards using Feedage.com which are the potential to increase traffic and potential to increase SEO value of your source site.

If you decide to submit your RSS feed into the Feedage.com directory, my past records have shown that I have received traffic from their site. It isn’t a lot, but it’s traffic I received without applying any tweaks or optimizations to. Here is what I recommend doing to make the best of your listing.

If you’re using WordPress, I recommend installing the Feedage.com Plugin and allowing a percentage visitors subscribe to your Feedage.com RSS Feed rather than your source feed, or FeedBurner feed. If you don’t have a WordPress blog, or you do and simply don’t want to install the plugin, I recommend redirecting your source feed to the Feedage.com RSS feed.

In either case, the purpose of directing traffic to your Feedage.com RSS feed is to gain subscribers. The reason why you want to increase the number of subscribers assigned to your Feedage.com feed is because the more you have subscribed, the higher you rank in the Feedage.com directory.

You don’t have to convert your entire RSS reader base to Feedage.com. Simply observe the number of subscribers it will take to rank #1 in their directory. Once you reach that number, then you can pull the plug and point your blogs RSS feed back to the source URL or FeedBurner.

The next element that might interest you is backlinks. When you submit your RSS feed into the Feedage.com directory, your content is syndicated on a webpage. Links to your homepage, and individual post page are made. These are all dofollow intext links. By default, many people might discount the value in these Feedage.com pages; however, I have seen a quite a few, and many have established PageRank as high as 5. The trick is to point links to your Feedage.com page.

If you take your Feedage.com page seriously, you’re going to generate a natural flow of traffic and links pointing to it. Over time, and a shorter period than many believe, your Feedage.com page will establish PageRank. Also, one thing to consider is the more popular your Feedage.com page gets, the more internal exposure it receives within Feedage.com itself. Ultimately, your Feedage.com page could become the featured blog on the homepage.

In summary, I think sites like Feedage.com tend to be very spammy, and low in quality. Typically, search engines feel the same. However, and for whatever reason, both people and search engines approve of Feedage.com. I think they should reduce the number contextual ads and also re-position them slightly.

If your blog is somewhat new and doesn’t rank well in the search engines already, you may find Feedage.com stealing your position. Which I guess is fine if you’re site isn’t ranking anyway. Keep in mind, only a small percentage of Feedage.com traffic will reach your site. The majority will click on the ads or click back after being subjected to viewing the ads.

What are your thoughts about Feedage.com, and similar sites? Do you think there is more harm than good allowing your content to be syndicated on a site that could potentially outrank your own blog posts? Do you think that it’s acceptable for other people to syndicate your content for the purpose of displaying contextual based ads and earning revenue?

Last week, I wrote a post that contained a list of the latest and greatest WordPress plugins that I have come across. The first plugin on this list was WP-Hive, which allows you to create multiple WordPress installations (on one domain or multiple domains) from a single database and set of WordPress files.

One of the biggest reasons I like this plugin so much is because it makes it very easy to keep all of your WordPress files up to date. Instead of logging into each blog or website that you have running WordPress, you can update your plugins or WordPress version one time, and your files will be updated across all of your blogs and websites running off of WP Hive. Since keeping your WordPress files up to date is one of the most effective ways to keep WordPress secure, this plugin can save you from a lot of trouble down the road.

While my experience with WP Hive has been very smooth, there was one issue that I ran into which wasn’t actually related to the plugin itself. Because I wanted to consolidate as many of my blogs and websites as possible, I actually converted some static HTML websites to WordPress. While the process went smoothly, once I had finished converting these sites, I realized that it was going to cause my indexed pages to lead to a 404 page.

Since I didn’t want to lose my traffic, I decided to 301 my old pages to the newer pages. However, this is where I ran into a problem. Although I have used .htacess files to create 301 redirects in the past, because of the way that WP Hive sets up your files, I couldn’t get the redirects to work. While I came across some very good resources on .htacess and 301 redirects, I simply could not get the redirects to work properly.

Fortunately, after reaching my peak level of frustration, I decided to see if I could solve my problem in the way that I solve most of my WordPress problems; I did a search to see if there was a plugin to create 301 redirects. And to my pleasant surprise, not only did I find one, but I found one that lived up to its name: Simple 301 Redirects.

After I downloaded the plugin, I uploaded it to the directory that contains my WordPress files. Then I logged into the admin area of one of my blogs which had been created using WP Hive, and I activated the plugin.

(image from WordPress.org)

As you can see from the screenshot above, once I activated the plugin and visited its main page, I was presented with a very easy to use interface. I simply entered the old link in the first box (ex. /photos.html) and then the current URL the in the second box (ex. http://www.mywphiveblog.com/photos/). After I clicked the Save Changes button, I looked up my old link in Google, and when I clicked it, I was instantly redirected to the current URL.

So, if you want to avoid losing traffic and rankings by sending users to pages that are going to give them a 404 error, Simple 301 Redirects is the plugin for you!

Last Tuesday, TechCrunch published a post titled “In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter Documents.” In the post, Michael Arrington explained that they had received 310 different corporate and personal Twitter documents from a hacker. Over the next two days, they published several of these documents, including Twitter’s financial forecast and internal strategy. Because these were confidential documents, these posts generated a lot of attention and controversy.

Although TechCrunch obviously attracted a lot of traffic and links by publishing these documents, they weren’t the only ones to benefit. Another person who took advantage of this situation was Alex Tew. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because of his famous MillionDollarHomePage project. Alex decided to take this situation and turn it into linkbait by creating a Flash game called The EV Files.

Like many Flash games, The EV Files is quite simple to play. You have thirty seconds to throw iPhones at an alien version of Michael Arrington (who pops up at different locations on the screen) and hit him as many times as possible.

In addition to being viral simply because it is an entertaining Flash game, when you finish playing the game, you are given the opportunity to Tweet your score (as seen below). Not only does this help attract more players, but it also provides a link back to the website.

Although it has only been on the Internet for a week, Yahoo Site Explorer is already showing that it has attracted 149 links. In addition to attracting links from prominent sites like the BBC, the site has also received exposure from popular Twitterers like Robert Scoble and Om Malik.

So, what are the value of these links? Well, currently the site is linked to one of Alex’s other projects, which is called PopJam. And although Alex sold a Flash game that was similar to this one for nearly $8,000, since The EV Files have attracted some quality links, it would make sense for him to do a 301 redirect of the site to his PopJam site in a few months when interest in the game has fallen off so that he can take advantage of the links he has gotten.

There is actually! And, it’s a darn good way too. For a long time I have know about this, but couldn’t figure out a good way to do this. I searched for software and never found anything, and the only thing I found that could do this for me was a half functional website.

But, before I get too far ahead here, I need to explain to you how you can increase your PageRank. As you may know, backlinks are needed in order to get more PageRank. More so, backlinks with high PageRank are even more important.

So, who the heck is going to give you free links from pages with high PageRank? Well, the answer is simple… you are! You might not realize this, but many of your own pages within your site have established their own level of PageRank.

I have known this for awhile, but the problem I always had was finding them. Yes, I can manually search for them, but this takes a long time and kind of feels like fishing in a pond with only one fish in it.

If there was software that could scan all my pages automatically and then sort them by highest PageRank first, that would be ideal. I never could find anything that would do something like this until a few weeks ago. Naturally, the software comes in the form of a Firefox Add-on.

The add-on is called, SeoQuake. If you download and install this add-on and search your own site using Yahoo Site Explorer, you can quickly and easily discover and sort all your internal pages by their PageRank level. You can also do this by searching for your site in Google too. Take a look at the screen shot below. It will show you SeoHosting.com’s pages sorted by PageRank:

[click image to view full size]

Doing this then gives you a tally of how many pages you can use within your own site for link building. You can use these pages to help boost your own home page PageRank, or use these pages to help establish and boost the PageRank of newly built sites you have developed.

Be careful not to build links to quickly, you don’t want to do anything unnatural because Google is kind of smart and may catch on to what you’re doing. The key here is having an available research to use towards proper link building. If you’re too aggressive with our link building campaign, you may even ruin the value of your high quality pages.

What else can you do to help increase PageRank quickly? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.

Regardless of how many or how few search engine optimization blogs you spend your time reading, one of the main topics that just about every SEO blog focuses on is building links. Although anyone with a basic understanding of SEO realizes that they need more links in order to rank higher in the search engines, there is a big difference between understanding this concept and actually understanding how to build links that have a significant impact on your rankings.

For today’s post, I want to take a look at how you can actually formulate a link building strategy that gets results for your website. While this is a topic that I will most likely address on multiple occasions, hopefully this introduction will get you pointed in the right direction.

When it comes to creating a link building strategy, I think that the best place to start is by doing some competitive analysis. In a perfect world, we could use Google to do this, but for the foreseeable future, we are all going to have to rely on the backlink data provided by Yahoo.

While anyone with an Internet connection can use Yahoo to get a list of the backlinks that one or more of their competitors have, the real trick is knowing what to do with these links. From my experience, the best thing for you to do is break the list of links down into the following four categories (which will allow you to actual focus and take action on pursuing those links):

The Low Hanging Fruit: As the name implies, these are the easy links to get. As you are going through the backlink list, links that can go into this category are ones from places like quality niche directories. These are the links that do carry value, but as long as you have a good site, you will have no problem obtaining in a short amount of time.

The Spam: Even if the competitor you are looking at is ranking well and has obtained links listed in the fourth category, this doesn’t mean that they don’t have at least a small amount of spammy links pointing towards their website. Whether it’s guest book spam or blatantly paid links (like a link from a directory that says “Pay $10 for a PR4 Link” on the homepage), just because these links appear in the backlink data does not mean that they carry any value. If you try to obtain, you are most likely just going to waste your time (or even worse, hurt your existing rankings).

The Mission Impossibles: These are the links that are even more of a waste of time than The Spam. Although there are other examples that fall into this category, the most common one is links from other websites which are owned by the same person. Even if these are quality links and you are tempted to pursue them, you are simply not going to get a competitor to help you boost your rankings.

The Gems: Once you get all of the low hanging fruit, the links in this category are the ones that you are going to spend your time pursuing. These are the kind of links that are given by bloggers or authority sites because of quality content. It’s going to take some time to create and market good content that’s going to attract these links, but these are the links that will really impact your rankings, so it’s worth the investment of time to go after them.

I’m sure that you have at least one great piece of information to add to what I talked about today, so please take a minute and share it with all of us in the comments area!