This week produced quite a bit of excellent content around link building. In this week edition of SEO Friday, we’ll recap some of these excellent articles and references that were published during this week. As you may know, link building is a very important aspect of improving your visibility in the search engines.

Ann Smarty, author of the successful Search Engine Journal, wrote an article titled, How To Build Links and Awareness by Pitching Bloggers. In this article she addressed that bloggers can be an excellent resource towards building links for the fact that most bloggers are always on the hunt for new material to write about and they are connected with many friends which gives your links the opportunity to go viral. The article was submitted into Sphinn, so be sure to help Ann out by casting your vote.

The author of a blog titled, Link Building Best Practices, wrote a very thoughtful piece that distinguishes the difference between SEOs and Link Builders. It is stated that there is a clear difference between the two skilsets and it is noted that commonly most people are either one or the other but not both. Understanding the difference between the two very well might break the boundary and expand the skilset from both professions. You should take a moment to help out by casting a vote on Sphinn.

SMX in London is at full force this week and one of the more popular topics — you guessed it — link building. Wiep Knol, author of a very informative link building blog, provided some coverage for all the folks who could not attend SMX in London with an article titled, Blog Your Mind Link Building Techniques. Without a doubt, there are some excellent links and references found in this article including a wonderful overview of the line up of professional speakers who gave speeches. As with the other two articles, providing your vote on Sphinn will help out the author.

What an amazing week to learn more about link building. What other articles did you read this week that helped you? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.

How Much Is Your Site Worth?

Have you ever wondered how much your web site is worth? Ann Smarty, author from Search Engine Journal and professional search engine optimization consultant, asked her readers just that, in an article titled, How Much Might Your Website Be Worth? The article provides some basic formulas and scenarios that can help you determine how much you should ask for your web site if one day you decide on selling it.

Regardless of the different formulas available, really the amount of money you can get for your web site is equal to the amount that someone is willing to pay. “The overall mathematician approach can be criticized as each website is unique and it can’t be evaluated by a simple formula.” Ann Smarty Said, and later continued, “My favorite method of determining how much a website it worth is the one by Yaro Starak.”

Yaro Starak is a young entrepreneur from Australia. Yaro has created, managed and sold several different Internet businesses since 1998. Yaro commonly says, “Your site is worth as much as someone is willing to give you for it.” which in my opinion makes sense. To me, it doesn’t matter how much a house appraises for, if the price isn’t right, or at an amount in which I feel it’s worth, I won’t buy it. The same would apply with a web site.

Twitter Attempts To Reduce Spam

In other news, it seems that Twitter is attempting to make an effort to better control spam by placing a limit on the number of people you can befriend. Brent Csutoras, author of a personal blog that provides information related to social media, Online marketing and search engine optimization, covered a story about the event. It seems that Twitter now limits following to 2000 people.

Brent Csutoras explains that he discovered this limit when doing some maintenance on his account, “I noticed this over the weekend when working on one of my accounts. I have had the account a long time and it has a high natural follower count, but found myself limited when I hit the 2,000 number of people I was following.” I think it is great that Twitter is making efforts towards preventing spam, but also too it would be great to see more efforts made towards the stability of their system. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen Twitter offline or have various program errors.

Effective Link Building Techniques

Tom Critchlow, Head of Search Marketing for Distilled, a London based company who provides SEO, PPC and Internet marketing services, published an article on SEOmoz titled, A Linkbuilding Method So Effective I Can’t Believe It’s Not Blackhat. In this article, he reveals some very interesting linkbuilding techniques. He claims that these techniques are totally whitehat and work. “a get-rich-quick linkbuilding tactic which actually works across virtually any niche.” said, Tom Critchlow. Majority of people in the search engine community are pleased with the article as it has received over 61 votes from the Sphinn.com community, one of which is from SEOHosting.com as well.

During the week I spend some time reading up on the latest news and gossip within the search engine market and week to week I end up having quite a few articles that I end up bookmarking or adding into my favorites. While I will continue to save these articles in my various bookmarks for my own personal use, I figured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to share with you some of the articles that I enjoyed reading through the week.

With that being said, here is an overview of some of the articles that I read this week that I think that you’ll enjoy reading too. Every Friday, you can mark your calendars and be sure to visit the SEOHosting.com blog for some really excellent references to what I would consider, “The Best in SEO” for the week. I call this weekly series, SEO Friendly Friday. Hope you enjoy, I know I sure enjoy helping your learn.

On July 29th, 2008,  Ann Smarty from Search Engine Journal wrote an article titled, 3 Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence. In this article she explains that using keyword prominence can indeed help you get better rankings, get your site indexed faster and improve how your listings appear in the search engines. On a prior published article Ann Smarty explained that using targeted keywords in the the title of a page, meta description, H1 and H2 tags, alt tags, anchor text links, bold and italic text and in the body text are examples of great keyword prominence. These really are some valuable SEO Tips.

On that same day,  Brian Carter, from Fuel Interactive, wrote an article titled, 5 Powerful Local Search Marketing Tactics. Brian explained that the material used in this article was part of his SMX Local 2008 Presentation. In this article, Carter provides an online video as well as an online slide presentation that is packed full of tips that will give you an edge on creating a powerful Local and Mobile Marketing Campaign. Carter provides his thoughts behind five tactics which include his suggestion to “Put All Your Money in Google AdWords!”, “Learn & Use the 4 Methods of AdWords GeoTargeting”, “Spend the Budget & Spend it Well”, “Avoid Local Tunnel Vision”, and lastly “Apply PPC Best Practices to Local Marketing.” This for sure is a piece that you too will want to add into your bookmarks for in depth study.

I’ll admit that July 29th, 2008 spawned quite a bit of excellent content for the search engine market community. David Harry, a marketing consultant who publishes on SEO Site Reference, wrote a piece titled, How to learn SEO in 2008. I enjoyed reading this article very much because in this article David Harry compiled a very excellent list and overview of resources that can indeed help you improve your SEO. David Harry provides a wealth of links and references that provide education and learning for anyone who is interested in SEO. In this article you can discover some of the greatest “SEO books”, “Online guides”, “Online training courses”, “Classes, Seminars and Conferences”, and a very complete list of “Blogs.” In addition to the mentioned references you too can get connected with some of the greatest “Media Outlets” and “SEO Forums.”

If you have a story that you’d like to share with me, feel free to send me an email with the material and it just might get included in a future publication on the SEOHosting.com blog.