Every Link Builder Needs to Know(Contd.)

A warm welcome to all the followers of this blog in the fresh NEW YEAR. Here is the second part of the previous post. I breakdown the whole article into five parts to relieve the sluggish feelings   of my readers. I feel reading a long post is boring, A short post is much entertaining to me. So, here you are:

 

 13.  How To Use Google Alerts

I don’t really see why people wouldn’t take advantage of this truly amazing (and free) tool. You can set up alerts for your brand, your name, your URL, your competitors, your important keywords…anything you can think of.
You can choose how often to get alerts, what types of results to monitor, and whether you want all results or just what Google determines to be the best results. The email from your alert makes it very easy to click through to the result, so if you’re trying to keep informed when something that you’re interested in is indexed, this is a fantastic, easy, and free way to do it.

14.  How To Use Some Form Of Web Analytics

I use Google Analytics on some sites, but there are other good packages out there. Don’t simply rely on rank checks alone to indicate how well the site is performing.

15.  How To Use Google’s Webmaster Tools

While I wouldn’t say that everyone needs to use Google Analytics, if you get even a small percentage of your traffic from Google, you need to use Webmaster Tools. It’s my first stop when something’s wrong. They alert you to problems with your site, allow you to run crawl checks, see your new links, look at your queries, and do about a ton of other things.

16.  What Makes A Link A Bad/Spammy Link

Considering the amount of times I’ve pointed out what I think are bad links to people, I don’t think that this is anything we all agree on. However, if a link exists on a page for no easily detectable reason other than that it was purchased or slapped on there through a network, it’s probably a bad link.
There are many awkward link placements that are totally legitimate of course, but if you see a link that doesn’t seem to belong, it’s most likely not a good link. In terms of a spammy link, those are links on sites that are just utter crap. A link for a shoe company that’s on a blogroll comprised of 99 links to everything from payday loans to the best hotel in Baltimore is a spammy link.

17. How To Tell If Code Is Invalid

There are a lot of different validators but a great resource is always http://validator.w3.org/. Bad code can potentially render properly (enough) in a browser but that doesn’t mean that things will work as they should. If you don’t know how to code and you can’t just identify bad code by looking at it, make friends with a validator.

18.  How To Check Redirects & Why They Matter

I always head to Rex Swain’s HTTP header check for this one If you’re building links to a site that runs on both a non-www and a www version with no 301 from one to the other, you’re splitting your link juice. If you’ve asked the tech guys to put in a 301 for a page that’s no longer where it once was, you need to be able to double-check to make sure it was done properly.

19.  How To Remove A Page That Has Lots Of Inbound Links

People have different opinions about this but I’d either 301 redirect the old page to the most relevant current page or to the home page. I wouldn’t remove it completely without handling it with a 301, as a 404 error just wastes that link juice.

20.  Recent Link Smack Downs

If you’re building links and you’re unaware of the fact that big brands can get penalized, you need to be paying more attention. Remember JC Penney’s troubles? If not, go look it up. The same goes for the recent deindexing of a few major blog networks. You need to keep yourself informed about all the guys who get into trouble because knowledge is (hopefully) power.

21.  Alternative Engines To Google

There’s Bing and Yahoo of course, but there are also some really cool meta search engines that are well worth exploring. Dogpile is one of my favorites, as is MillionShort. Don’t limit your discovery to one engine. You can find some jewels if you look somewhere else, and that includes directories.

22.  Crazy Methods For Discovery

 This is one of my favorite things to do…just sit down and brainstorm some off the wall ideas. My son recently said, out of the blue in the car, “taco death pool.”
That’s what I mean by crazy discovery. I can safely say that I’ve never seen most of the sites that show up for that search in Google. If a search brings you something you’ve never seen before, that’s a good thing.

23.  How To Use Social Media For Discovery

Icerocket is my favorite tool for this but there are others, and you can just go the old-school route of doing a search in Twitter of course. This is a particularly good way to keep your eye on bloggers who might write about content that pertains to your own site so that maybe you can snag a nice guest post slot.
Followerwonk is also a great tool that lets you search keywords in Twitter bios. Not only can you find bloggers talking about content that’s relevant to you, you can see what topics might be trending so that you can craft content around those as well.

Here comes end for the day. Relax and enjoy reading! More to come next.Till then a very good reading and all the best. Coming soon with a short break.