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.

In this article, I am going to show you a method that I use daily towards getting absolutely free and powerful backlinks to my blog. The other day I wrote a post titled, A Simple Yet Effective Link Building Techique. For the sake of simplicity, we’re going to call that post, Part I. I want to continue that into a second segment that I will from now call call, How To Get Free BackLinks.

Today, we are going to discuss Part II. When I wrote the first post, I decided to break things down into sections. If I didn’t I would have just created an eBook for you to download. So with that said, let me show you another method towards getting free backlinks to your web site or blog.

Now, many of you guys and gals know about companies such as Text-Link-Ads.com and ReviewMe.com. Make no mistake, these type of businesses work and work very well. For those who don’t know what these services offer, they provide people with a way to purchase backlinks. Text-Link-Ads.com is more blunt about it and ReviewMe.com attempts to sugar coat the process by making publishers write a crafty review about the site needing the backlink.

Both places are owned by the same company and both companies are hot on Google’s radar. Selling links for the purpose of boosting PageRank is against Google’s Web Master Guidelines. So when you use places such as the two services mentioned above, you really put your blog, web site and or business at risk. With that said, there are ways towards getting around this so that you can totally boost your PageRank and not get caught.

Now, I must tell you that this tip is more effective for bloggers, especially bloggers who have a bunch of other friends who are bloggers too. If this isn’t you, then what I am about to show you still is possible, but you will be challenged a little bit with executing. With that said, let’s continue on.

The first step is choosing the keywords or phrases that you want to have link to your blog or web site. In the tutorial, we’re going to use the word Traffic. Second thing we want to do is do a scan on different blogs that have used the word traffic. This is where having blog friends can really help you in this situation. In this tutorial we’re going to use SEOHosting.com, because we are all Best Friends with SEOHosting.com, right?

In order to find the blog posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that use the word traffic, we need to use Google. Ironically, we are going to use the same search engine in which we are attempting to build backinks towards ranking better on. I find that funny, but at any rate, here is how you do it.

In the Google search bar type: traffic site:seohosting.com/blog

When you do that, you will see a complete listing of pages that have the word traffic on it. Now, I am not sure how familiar you are with WordPress, but publishers are not able to add links to category sections. So any listing you see that has the word category in the url of the listing in the SERP doesn’t count. Same goes with tag and archive. The little treasures you are looking for are the blog posts. In order to have Google display only the blog posts that have the word traffic on it you can do the following:

In the Google search bar type: traffic -category -tag -archives site:seohosting.com/blog

What this will do, is strip away all of the categories, tags and archives from the results and only display blog posts with that have the word traffic in it. Does this sound too hard to remember? I don’t know about you, but things like this can be kind of tricky. But that’s ok, these special searches you are doing are called Advanced Operator searches. Google has a bunch of them that you can do. If you can’t remember how to do all this technical Google filtering, then check this out:

This is called Google Advanced Search. In fact, here is a LIVE EXAMPLE of the above screen shot. All you have to do is answer a few simple questions, and Google will filter the results how you want it.

So what is the point to all this? Well, I have shown you a lot of information here, so let’s recap. The purpose of doing all this is to find blog posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that use the word traffic. Again, we are trying to get our own web site to rank in Google for the word traffic and in order to do that, we are going to need help from our blogger friends.

Now that we know which posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that uses the word traffic, we can pick out a few of the posts, and contact the author of the blog and ask him to edit the post and add the link in. If you are scanning the blogs of your friends, having success in this request should not be too difficult at all.

Keep in mind, you don’t want to have more than maybe ten posts from one blog to point links back to yours. I can not PROVE this, this is just my opinion. However, with my link building techniques, I play things very safe. Also, you don’t want to score a ton of backlinks in a short period of time, if you do, Google will catch that and hunt you down.

I hope that you found this article to be helpful. As always, I would love to hear from you. What are some other ways that you score free backlinks? Drop me a comment 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.