These days you have to get creative with your link building. I mean, paid links will get you in trouble. Links from the same web site over and over again will eventually cease to provide you any new benefits. Setting up an off site blog was a great way to build inbound links for a while, and it still is with Yahoo!, but that benefit is fading. Article marketing is still effective, but who knows how long that will last?

When it comes to link building, especially with Google, you have to really work hard to get good links. Well, now there is another tool that you can use to help build some quality inbound links to your website, and possibly even get new traffic. The website is Yedda.

Yedda, like Yahoo! Answers and similar sites, allows you to ask questions or answer questions that others have posed and link back to the source. Think about that. Someone asks a question about something within your niche and you know the answer. You answer the question then link to a page on your website that provides more detail. Instant inbound link.

What kind of navigation bar do you have on your site? Is it effective? Does it increase your SEO or decrease it?

Some people aren’t aware that a navigation bar made from Javascript elements is not effective SEO. Sure, they look cool, but search engines can’t crawl them. You’re much better off with simple links. Here’s what I mean. The code will look something like this:

< a href="#" onclick="javascript:void(...)" >Web Page< /a >

The problem with this kind of hyperlink structure in your navigation bar is that whatever cool feature you have included in there will look good but the search engines tend not to crawl them. Therefore, your SEO benefits are diminished. Instead, you should use the following type of URL structure for all the links in your navigation bar:

< a href="http://www.thisisthepageurl.html" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/www.thisisthepageurl.html');">Weg Page

This simple code works better because the search engines don’t have to wait for a script to run, which slows down your page load time, but also because you don’t have to worry about the search engines crawling the links. They will.

It is unclear whether Google’s new policy of following links within forms and drop-down boxes is going to affect this. Until we know otherwise, it’s best to stick with what we know works.

An article SiteProNews got my attention when I read a headline about the best 3 - count ‘em, three! - SEO tips for this year. Here’s what the author suggested:

• Subscribe to Google Alerts
• Search Engine Optimize your 404 page
• Build links - seriously

Notice he didn’t say “optimize your content.” I wonder why.

Seriously, everyone serious about search engine optimization knows that optimizing your content is important, but can you over-optimize? Can you under-optimize it? Can you optimize it optimally?

It’s not a joke. You can use too many keywords for your content pages. You can also use too few. And you do it just right and still not get ranked well for your important keywords. That’s because keywords are not the only elements the search engines look for in order to rank your website against your competitors. Other factors, which you don’t have control over, are the age of your website and the age of your competitors’ websites, how well your competition does at optimizing their websites, and other related ranking factors concerning your competition. Let’s face it, Search Engine Optimization is competition.

I think Google Alerts is a wonderful tool. I also like the suggestion about optimizing your 404 page, but even if you don’t, it’s not a deal breaker. Neither of those two suggestions will make or break you. Even mediocre content won’t necessarily kill your business. But not building links will.

There is a lot of emphasis on optimizing your content, and rightfully so, but truth be told, you can spend too many hours anally going over every word to get the best optimization you can get when you could be doing something much more productive with your time - like building links. You can actually write mediocre content and build links to your website and see your search positions rise just on that alone. Rarely will you ever see your search positions rise on the basis of improving your site’s content without doing anything else. If you do, it’s likely because your content sucked in the first place.

So what it really boils down to is this: Would you rather have mediocre content and darned good links or kick a$$ content and hardly no links at all? As for me, I’d rather have awesome inbound links and mediocre content. Though it can’t be said enough that content that doesn’t sell, now matter how well optimized it is, isn’t going to do you much good at all even if you have the best linking strategy in the world.

There are two things that good links do for your website. They’re both easy to measure and easy to accomplish, but it is time consuming to do it the right way.

Links can increase your search positioning - i.e. your rank in the search engines as part of your Search Engine Optimization. But it can also drive traffic to your website. Neither of these are really hard, but it can complicated trying to figure out what type of links you really need.

When it comes to traffic, there are two ways to think about it. You can go for quantity, in which case you simply try to get as many links as you can in as many places as you can. The danger with this is that you could get pegged as a spammer and your Search Engine Optimization benefits will decline. The upside is, if you do it right, you’ll get a lot of traffic. And you don’t necessarily need link juice in order to make this happen. Nofollow links work just as well as relevant links from high PageRank sites. If you are link building for traffic then don’t worry too much about the Search Engine Optimization.

On the other hand, to get the best links you’ll need to concentrate at least some of your efforts on building relevant links from high PageRank sites. By increasing your link popularity, you essentially are telling people that you are serious about building a brand. That link popularity will translate into higher search engine positions, which in turn leads to more traffic.

It makes sense, then, that if you want more traffic and higher search positioning then you’ll work on increasing the trust factor of your website and seek quality links. While quality is better than quantity, quantity is better than nothing and quality + quantity is best of all. So figure out a way to get as many really good links as you can and keep trying until you get it right.

Photo sharing site Flickr has recently started using nofollow tags in its individual photo descriptions, reports CNET and WebProNews. Should we care?

There are two ways to look at this. The first way is that nofollow links in the descriptions of individual photos might discourage certain search engine optimizers or webmasters from posting photos to Flickr. That may not be bad as those most discouraged are probably spammers and webmasters looking for cheap link juice. On the other hand, legitimate search engine optimizers and webmasters will suffer along with the spammers and may end up finding other ways to get free links.

The second way to look at this is that that Flickr is now in the practice of selling paid links. Here’s the gist of the change:

(WPN) The links in Set and Collection descriptions are still free of them, but the links embedded in individual photo descriptions have been nofollowed.

Since Flickr members are only allowed three Sets, that means free members will be limited in the number of links they can add and get link juice from. Only paid members who have more than three Sets will have an unlimited link juice at their disposal, which makes Flickr effectively a link seller. How will Google treat Flickr now that this policy has been implemented?

Personally, I don’t see much to worry about. Legitimate search engine optimizerss and webmasters will always find ways to get good links and spammers will always find ways to game the system. Many social sites are adding nofollow tags to prevent the spammers from gaming the system. I say keep posting your photos to Flickr and get a little creative in how seek inbound links. We do not want this to negatively affect search engine optimization as much as it could!

One of the best blog posts I’ve seen in a long time addressing anchor text links and alt tags is on Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Quite frankly, I don’t like Aaron’s new tagline. It doesn’t really say much. The “Rank” and “Dominate” are clear enough. It’s the “Learn” part that really bothers me. But it’s his tagline. I think the blog post has a lot to offer and because it’s Aaron Wall, I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt:

One of my hobby sites has a fairly flat file structure, and some of the internal pages are somewhat linkworthy. The site was not marketed aggressively and the only sitewide link to the homepage was the logo, which I forgot to put an image alt tag on. Google ranked 2 pages on the site well for the core keyword, but neither of those pages were the homepage. I noticed the lacking image alt tag, fixed it, and within a week my homepage was outranking the other pages.

According to SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking factors, alt tags rank moderately high in importance for ranking factors. I agree with that since search engines don’t crawl images. The alt tag is almost the only clue search engines have for ranking images. They do look at surrounding text on the page and page quality factors, etc. But what is missing in the study is the importance of the link title attribute. I went looking for it and couldn’t find it.

That said, I do believe that the title attribute is of some importance, though probably not as important as the image alt tag. An image hot linked to a website with a strong alt tag will likely draw much more mojo than the the title attribute on an anchor text link. However, I don’t see how the hot linked image, no matter how strong the alt tag is, can even come close to strong anchor text, with or without the title attribute. I think the reason the title attribute isn’t as important as the anchor text itself is because the anchor text is so important that the title attribute pales in comparison. Still, I would include the title attribute in every link possible.

According to the same SEOmoz study, bold text with keyword usage is only slightly less important than the alt tag. I disagree with this somewhat. When it comes to search engine optimization, I think bold and italics indicates importance to the page content writer, but that doesn’t always equate to search engine importance, although it may. It depends on the other on-page qualities. Nevertheless, if we use the .3 difference between alt tag importance and bold text importance as a benchmark, I think the difference in importance between alt tags and title attributes is only slightly more than that - maybe a .5 or .6. What that says to me is that, given two web pages that are equivalent in all factors except that one uses an image alt tag with a missing title attribute on the page and the other includes a title attribute but misses the image alt tag then the page that has the alt tag is going to win out, only by a nudge. I don’t know if Aaron would agree with that, but it makes sense to me.

You’ve been told time and time again that directory submissions are necessary to help build up your link portfolio. But just how necessary are they?

Well, it depends. For the most part, it is a necessary link building strategy for search engine optimization but be careful who you hire to do it. There are a lot of directory submission and search engine optimization companies out there that promise you the moon, but all they really do is mass submit your website to directories and there is no follow through. If you’re going to pay someone to submit your website, e-zine, or blog to a directory then you should pay someone to do it manually. Otherwise, you’re really just wasting your dollars.

I highly recommend directories. They do provide you with one way links and many of them are from high PR sites. But don’t fret about it. Many websites have done very well without directory submissions. What the directory submissions do for you, though, is provide you with inbound one-way links that can prove valuable to your trust factor over time. But it isn’t the most important thing to be doing with your time and money. Building well optimized high value content pages for your website is far more important.

I’ve often touted the benefits of trackbacking. It’s a useful strategy, particularly for new blogs, for a number of reasons:

• You can usually garner some link juice from older, more established websites and gain valuable inbound links from relevant, high PR sites
• Trackbacks can be a good source of new traffic and new, loyal readers
• It engages conversation between professionals within the same industry
• Can save your butt when you borrow snippets from other blogs because a trackback is a form of attribution

While trackbacks can be good, there are some dangers to receiving the trackbacks of others and bloggers who get a lot of trackbacks should be very careful about which ones they approve. I recently had to go back and delete several trackbacks and comments that I’ve received over the months due to those comments and trackbacks hurting my search engine rankings.

Yes, it’s true. The wrong kind of trackbacks can ruin your SEO. Here are some reasons you might want to not approve specific comments are trackbacks on your blog:

• The trackback goes to a site that is a link farm
• When you click on the URL of the commenter you get a 404 page
• The comment or trackback is very generic and doesn’t add anything to the conversation
• You visit the site leaving a trackback and all they have there is your content and nothing else
• You try to visit the site leaving the comment and you are redirected to another URL
• The site linking to you is in another language

Many people leave comments that are legitimate, but many others do not. Some of the comments I deleted this morning from this blog were from scrapers who lifted my content and linked back to me without providing any other value to readers on their blog. This provides no value to you or your readers. They are just trying to steal your traffic. I also deleted comments from sites that redirected me to another URL. I think I am going to an Internet marketing blog and I end up on a camera sales page. Not good. These redirects could hurt your rankings. Broken links will also affect your rankings so get rid of those.

The most interesting comments I got were from bloggers who blogged in another language. These blogs are probably legitimate and likely won’t hurt my rankings at all, but they are written in another language. The blogger leaves a comment in English and links to a Russian or German site. I do not speak Russian or German, and I’m assuming that most of my readers don’t either. If the site provides no value to your readers then you should think twice about approving the comment.

When it comes to comments and trackbacks you have to be diligent not to approve every one. Bad inbound links can kill your site faster than good ones can benefit it.

First, SEOmoz created its search ranking factors. Now, Wiep.net has created a similar list of link value factors.

While no two SEOs are going to agree on everything, I think this is a useful list. It utilizes the knowledge of a good cross-section of SEOs and Internet marketers. Sure, there is disagreement, but because of the way the list is put together and the weight put on each person’s opinion, you can use these link value factors in your SEO. As Wiep Knol says, “I’s not rocket science - it’s way cooler.”

Below are the top 10 most agreed upon important factors in determining a link’s value:

1. Robots.txt excluded page (DF) - 4.75
2. Anchor text - 4.56
3. Link is on penalized page (DF) - 4.50
4. Page authority (in inbound links) - 4.38
5. Domain authority (in quality of backlinks) - 4.38
6. Amount of outbound links on page - 4.25
7. Total amount of links on page - 4.06
8. Age of domain - 4.06
9. Relevant authority (in rankings on relevant keywords) - 3.94
10. Javascript link (DF) - 3.88

You’ll have to go to the website to see what the scores mean and how they are computed, but while I wouldn’t agree with everything on this list, or in the exact order they appear, I think most of it has merit. I definitely agree with the top two on the list being the most important.

The top 5 factors where most of those polled agreed upon, which pretty much solidifies their importance of lack of it, are:

1. Alexa ranking
2. Robots.txt excluded page (DF)
3. Domain authority (in quality of backlinks)
4. Page relevance (words only)
5. Number of links

Just in case you’re wondering, all the professionals who offered an opinion agreed that Alexa Ranking has no direct influence on the value of a link. My response? Duh.

Finally, and this is interesting, the most controversial factors in the poll are:

1. TLD (.com, .edu, etc.) -based on TLD alone
2. Type of link (image, text)
3. Domain authority (in PageRank)
4. Domain authority (in rankings on irrelevant keywords)
5. Target page (where the link points to) location

I certainly agree that the No. 1 most controversial factor is indeed the most controversial. Ask any two SEOs on any given day of the week whether the top level domain of a linking website affects that link’s value and they’ll disagree. I’m surprised that so many SEOs say it does. I don’t believe so at all. Although, here’s the caveat, as many SEOs pointed out, the search engines do seem to like .gov and .edu domains. But I think that has to do with the fact that these domains are considered reliable sources by a large number of other websites that link to them, which increases their own link value influence. Take away the back links of these .gov and .edu domains and I think TLD is no factor at all.

Wiep’s link value factors is an interesting read. It is definitely useful, if for any reason, to get SEO professionals thinking about link values in objective terms (if there is such a thing) and not see link values as a random pick in the dark. I don’t think that is the case, but it isn’t an exact science either. Nevertheless, it’s worth a careful study.

I’m glad someone else is writing about inbound links.

It isn’t hard. Every now and then a small business owner will come along and ask, “What’s the best source of inbound links?” Well, there are several, actually. There is no ONE source that is better than all others. There are several sources that are good. An article in SEO-News.com lists 10 of them:

• Blog Comments
• Blog Trackbacks
• Forums
• Off-site Web Pages
• Wikis
• Social Networking
• Social Bookmarking
• Organized Surfing Sites
• Link Begging

Most of these don’t need any explanation. They’ve been talked about enough that every webmaster should know about them by now. But there are a few here that beg an explanation.

Off-Site Web Pages - Some websites now, like Squidoo and MySpace allow users to build content around a theme. You can link to your website from these pages, which amounts to a relevant inbound link. In the case of both Squidoo and MySpace, that link is from a high PR website.

Wiki - You can usually pay someone a fair price to edit content for you to make it sound like a third-party piece of content rather than write about yourself and attempt to make it sound objective.

Organize Surfing Sites - These sites are almost like social bookmarking sites. Two of the most popular are Digg and StumbleUpon. They allow searchers to find information online more easily through surfing and “tag hopping.”

Link Begging - Just like it sounds. This is perhaps the oldest form of link building and it still works, but it is time consuming. You find sites like yours and ask for links. Sometimes you have to promise a link in return, and that’s OK.

Other legitimate link building practices include:

• Article Marketing
• Article Exchanging
• Banner and Display Advertising
• Directory Listings
• Social Community Listings

Whatever you do for link building, make sure you do something. It’s one of the most important factors to building your online reputation.

These 20 SEO tips are a gold mine. I’d like to elaborate on though:

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html. Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

A lot of webmasters are confused, particularly new webmasters, about the difference between domain names with www at the forefront and those without. If you purchase a domain anme these days you’ll automatically get a redirect from www to the non-www site, or vice versa. In other words, you won’t find a competitor snagging up one while you’ve got the other. Buying one buys both. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to worry about.

When performing your link building campaigns you need to pick one or the other and focus on that. All of your links should point to one domain or the other. Otherwise, you’re splitting your links and killing your link popularity. If you have 50,000 links with 25,000 pointing to www.imagoober.com and the other half pointing to http://imagoober.com then you only have a link popularity of 25,000. By ensuring that all of your links point to the exact same domain name, you’ll double your link popularity. Believe me, that will make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. That link popularity will determine where you fall in search engine rankings and affect your PageRank. Splitting your links could cost you valuable business.

If you’ve been waiting for MSN to start reporting inbound links again, you can relax. It’s finally happened. While using Marketleap to check link popularity, I saw that MSN has started reporting links again. That’s the best news I’ve heard all year. It means that webmasters can now get a realistic picture of where they stand in their link building strategies.

Link building is an important part of being a webmaster. If only two of the top 3 search engines are reporting their links it is really difficult to get a good handle on where you stand. MSN quit reporting links earlier in the year because the search engine claimed it was having problems with data mining. I supposed they’ve fixed the problem.

Another great service Marketleap has added is link popularity checking for specific web pages. This is ideal for webmasters because now you can check to see how well your link bait is working. Before, all you could was check the link popularity of a website. By being able to check the link popularity of individual web pages you can get a better feel for how your specific link bait strategies are working. As far as I know, Marketleap is the only link popularity checker that provides link popularity numbers for individual web pages.

One can get wrapped up into definitions real easily. There is a tendency to think about SEO only in terms of search engine benefits, but that’s not always the case. Certainly, search engine positioning is the primary benefit to be gained from your SEO efforts. But don’t get locked into thinking that SEO is all about where you stand with Google.

There are other ways to measure your SEO success. For instance, did you know that many smaller search engines and directories get their information from Google, Yahoo!, and the bigger search engines? It’s true. You don’t even have to submit your website to some of these search engines, aggregators, and directories. They will find you. Dogpile.com may not be your No. 1 source of traffic, but it could send you traffic in small doses and that traffic could just as easily convert into sales as any other.

Other sources of traffic, and enhanced SEO benefits, come from sites like StumbleUpon and Digg. The bookmarking sites do not provide primary SEO benefits - at least not in the sense that you should be bookmarking your web pages in order to enhance your SEO. But it’s important to realize that you could be building additional inbound links from these sites when your pages are bookmarked.

Some of the best SEO benefits come from the inbound links you create at social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. You don’t even have to be particularly active in these websites. Just build a profile and your profile link counts as an inbound link as well as any other. Because of the reputation of those sites, those are valuable links.

Directories like DMOZ and SearchSight also offer SEO advantages. Just by creating a listing at those sites, you are building a reputation for yourself that translates into more SEO benefits. You do the same thing when you submit articles to article directories.

Many online marketing strategies carry SEO benefits, even if ever so slightly. While I wouldn’t necessarily use the strategies as SEO tools per se, I am always conscious that there may be SEO benefits to using them and I try to think of the best ways to get the most SEO mileage from the strategies that I do use. Are you doing that? You should be. SEO, while not the be all-end all of everything, should be on the top of your mind always.

Link popularity refers to the number of inbound links you have pointing at your website. Do you know how to check this?

There are various tools you can use to check your link popularity. Which one you use depends a lot on your preferences, but I like MarketLeap.

The reason I like MarketLeap is because you can also check your search engine saturation on the website. It’s the only link popularity checker that I’m aware that also allows you to look at your SES. So it has benefit for that reason alone.

Other link popularity checkers include:

• SEO Chat
• LinkPopularity.com
• Submit Express

Any of these tools will work for checking your link popularity, but I use MarketLeap. Which one you use is up to you, but you should check your link popularity from time to time to see where you stand on inbound links.

If you have a network of blogs that are connected to each other by links and they don’t have any obvious relationship other than the fact that they are owned by you, I’d suggest that you de-link them.

As you know, Google recently updated everyone’s PageRank. That’s likely good news for most of you, but for some of you, especially you old-timers who are used to doing things a certain way, you might have got picked on this time. There were two ways that Google punched back at web-savvy entrepreneurs who have been, even unwittingly, gaming the system - or just making out with its downside.

Google’s Relevance Crusade
First, Google doesn’t like paid links. We all know that, right? So if you’ve been buying or selling links, especially selling, then you likely took a hit. Even if it just looked like you might have been selling links but have never done that then it’s likely that you took a hit. Que sera, sera. Right?

The second group of webmasters who took it on the chin are the same type of webmaster that I am. They own several businesses that may or may not be related (in my case, they are) and they have been linked together in either a circular fashion or in a fashion like a spider web so that all the cross links cross each other in a weird wired sort of way. What’s so wrong with this?

The problem is that many webmasters will own several non-related businesses and link them together so that they drive traffic from the more popular websites to the less popular. There’s nothing wrong with that except that the more trafficked websites tend to also have higher PageRank, which these webmasters have been using to boost the PageRank of their less popular websites.

Another way this is often played out is that several webmasters will join a loose network where they agree to link to each other even though there is no sensible reason to do so. Their websites have no related subject matter so why should they link to each other?

The Relevance Of Bad Links
Google’s way of dealing with this relevance phenomenon is to make relevance a more important factor in its PageRank determinations. It was already important, but it just became more important. In fact, it’s so important now you might be penalized if you link to sites that are not related in subject matter in any way, even if you own both websites.

I personally didn’t take a hit in PageRank this time around, but I know that Google will only work to perfect its algorithms and make them better. There is likely to be another tweak in this algorithm between now and the next update and I don’t want to get caught in the crossfire. So I’m making some changes and I would suggest that you too should rethink how you link your websites together - those that are related and those that aren’t.