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.

Every Link Builder Needs To Know

Like it or not, link building has been and still is big, big business. Doing it well takes a lot of time and resources, which means that many webmasters/site owners can’t or don’t want to do it themselves. Many agencies that handle other aspects of search engine marketing want to outsource it simply because of the massive resource drain.

That’s great news for people like me who specialize in link building but the intense supply and demand nature of links coupled with the ease of promoting yourself through social media have led to a frightening increase in people who build bad links and really have no idea what they’re doing.

As link building is considered an offpage tactic, to actually sell yourself as a link builder, you don’t have to do very much. People are desperate for help.

However, it’s better to build no links than it is to embark upon a link building campaign that is full of nothing but spam that you will pay for twice: once when you put it up there, once when you have to remove it. If you’re shopping for link builders, make sure that the one you go with knows most of the following.

1.  Why Links Matter

There’s no way to describe that quickly here but if you don’t know why links are important, you shouldn’t be building them alone. Links are how users and search engine spiders move around the internet and they give clues to what the linked-to content is about.

2.  HTML Code For Text & Image Links

For a good reference you can visit http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp but generally, it’s pretty darned easy stuff:

3.  How To Read A Robots.txt File

These can be tricky and you’ll see a lot of robots files that are coded incorrectly, so if you’re unsure of how to read one, there are a few good validators that are online. (I usually gravitate towards http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml.)

Robots files are always named robots.txt and are always found at the root, which means you can always access them at yoursite.com/robots.txt. If one doesn’t exist, well, you just won’t see one. That’s not a problem, but if one is there, make sure it’s valid.

Here’s the code you want to really watch out for:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

That tells the search engines to go away when they show up. People commonly use this when they don’t have a development/test environment so that they can code live but not have the site get indexed. That’s ok if it’s how you want to work, but remember to remove that exclusion when you do want the engines to index you.

If your site has recently disappeared, check the robots.txt immediately. You can also block engines using the method listed below.

4.  How To Check For Robots Blocking Outside Of The Robots.txt File

There are some intricacies involved with using this method so it’s a good idea to read what Google has to say about blocking robots here.
If your site has just disappeared and you have checked the robots.txt file and it’s all fine and dandy, check to see if this line is in your code:

5.  How To Use WordPress

As one of the most common blogging platforms, you should familiarize yourself with it. It’s quite user-friendly in my opinion but there are tons of tutorials out there. However, like with many things, it’s something you can learn best by actually setting up a site and using it.

If you don’t want to use WordPress, that’s fine – just learn how to set up a basic site on a popular platform. Here’s why I think this is so important for link building: once you are intimately involved in the innards of a site, you do start to think more critically about SEO, content creation, and usability. Those are all aspects of marketing that aren’t always involved with link building, but they should be.

6.  How To Do A Link Audit

Don’t wait to audit your links until you get a warning letter from Google. Check and see what’s there right now. There are some great free tools that will give you a list of your back links so use them. You won’t always get all the functionality that you need from free tools and free versions of tools so if you’re doing a decent amount of link building, you should probably invest in at least one major paid link tool.

Grab your data and start to analyze it whether you can export it or you have to copy and paste it. You need to know how to look at your profile as a whole, break it down into different parts (like percentages of sitewides, money keywords, etc.) and actually look at the sites in the report and evaluate whether or not that link is a good one.

7.  Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Located here they’re something you should be familiar with, especially if you plan to violate them.

8.  How To Do A Basic Link Check In Various Tools

Don’t limit yourself to one. Some databases are refreshed more often than others, some give you more information that you might ever need, some give you less, etc.

9.  How To Analyze Anchor Text

You need to be able to grab your information and sort the anchors into categories like brand, URL, money keywords, and noise at a minimum.

10.  How To Do Competitive Analysis

I truly don’t think that there’s a better post about this than one written by Jane Copland. Whether you always perform competitive analysis or not, you need to know how to critically analyze your competitors and figure out why they’re doing better than you when they are. Sometimes people only do this when things go wrong, so I suggest you do it when things are going well so you aren’t trying to think critically when you’re in panic mode.

11.  How To Negotiate A Link

Whether it’s through an emailed link request, a phone call, a guest post, a connection on social media, etc. you need to know how to deal with people. Just people this is all online doesn’t mean that you can ignore basic manners and politeness. If you want something specific, lay it out and don’t take 10 emails to say so. If you don’t get what you want, either speak or or shut up and deal with it.

12.  How To Keep Up With Algorithm Updates

If you’re involved in SEO and pay attention online, it’s pretty obvious when a big algorithm update happens. However, if you’re not that involved, SEOMoz has a good list and the Google Webmaster Central Blog does an excellent job of explaining changes. If you notice something odd, just search for “algorithm change” and if there’s anything notable, you’ll see it.

That's all for the day...Will be back with more on the issue..till then Enjoy with lots of fun n music coz it's time to go ahead forgetting all the past failures to retain success.... Happy New Year2013.