It’s all about spam. While some sites, like Twitter, nofollow all their links in an attempt to discourage spam (because it works so well on Twitter, huhn?), Yahoo! Answers has decided to go another route in controlling spam. They’re just not going to activate your links.

That’s right, according to the Yahoo! Answers Blog, URLs posted by Level 1 users, new users, will not be activated. In order to see your URLs activated, you’ll have to become a Level 2 user. In other words, you must first be initiated and accepted by the community leaders.

I’ve seen this type of thing happening more and more in the last couple of years and I think it will happen even more going forward. Web communities are becoming extremely sensitive to search engine spam. And if a website - like Yahoo! Answers, for instance - is a popular destination for people trying to game a quick, cheap link then it will be a haven for spammers. The reason sites become spam havens is because they have so much value to contribute to legitimate marketing efforts. It’s a classic take of you take the bad with the good.

Only now, the bad isn’t so good if you’re on the bad team. I say Yay Yahoo! Answers! Make them earn the right to be a linker.

A reader asked me a question in a recent blog comment, so I decided to write a blog post about this topic. The question was: When it comes to link building, which is better: Articles or directory submissions?

Before we answer that question, let’s answer a more fundamental question: Why do you need links in the first place?

Links are important for a couple of reasons. First, they are a method of driving traffic to your website and to build and increase your online trust factor. In fact, place enough links in all the right places and you can drive targeted traffic to your most important web pages. Secondly, links are good for offsite search engine optimization purposes. All the major search engines base their ranking algorithms in part on link analysis. The most sophisticated of the link analysis algorithms is Google’s. The largest search engine on the Web judge link quality on factors such as anchor text relevance, PageRank of the linking page, link age, page relevance, diversity of link sources, and several other factors. Get the right mix of links and you can watch your page rankings go from mediocre to good or good to great in a short time.

So what is better for building links? Directory submissions or articles?

One way to think about this is to ask yourself which of these is better equipped to deliver you links that meet one or more of the above-mentioned criteria. Directory submissions, if done correctly, can deliver great link juice based on domain age, page age, and link age, relevance factors, and several other factors important to link analysis. But it’s only one link. One article, however, has the potential to do all of the above more than once. In fact, one article has the potential to build more solid links over time than 100 directory submissions. And if you multiply the potential by 100 articles at 100 directories, well, you can see the potential multiply exponentially. Either way, I normally recommend submitting your website to the top online directories and even industry/association specific directories. For article submission, eZine is great and also writing for industry specific websites/blogs is another great way to place your articles, increase visitors and highly relevant link popularity.

Directory submissions is a one-time thing. You submit and your done. The only real numbers aspect of it to think about it how many directory submissions you want to make. The more you do the better your chances of building solid links. Articles, on the other hand, are more effective is you maintain a consistent submission pace over a period of time. But because one article has more potential long-term in building the right links in the right places than a hundred, or a thousand, directory submissions, I’m going to have to fall down on the article side on this one.

OK, I’m playing fast and loose with the word “approved”, but I think you’ll find these link building methods pretty sound. Not all SEOs agree with these techniques, but I do. They are not “blackhat” by any stretch. They will build you good, solid links, but they each do require a time commitment and a budget. However, all things considered, they are less expensive than the most popular link building methods - so I guess you could say that’s a positive.

I am going to talk about 3 types of relevant link building but, I highly recommend that a blended approach is taken to build trust over a period of time. This chart explains the approach better:

It’s not original. I’ve discussed all of these methods before. But this blog post by Michael Martinez is what prompted today’s post. I can’t vouch for the Fantomaster service he reviews here in this article, but I can vouch for the three link building methods as proven. Here they are in reverse order:

Article Distribution - You don’t necessarily need a subscription service to succeed at article marketing. But articles do build good, solid links. If you can write and submit 10 articles a day, more power to you. If you can only do 5 a day then that’s OK too. The important thing is that you write and submit articles as often as you can. Articles build links, period.

Read other posts about article marketing:

• Cool Ideas For Building Links
• Traffic, Links, And Article Sandwiches
• How To Get Quick Backlinks And Create A Buzz

Blogging - Yes, blogging builds links. But the way it is taught by most gurus, you wouldn’t think so. That’s why most people only use one blog, and don’t do that very consistently. Nevertheless, multiple blogs building links to one site can help that site tremendously over time. You can build good, solid links from multiple blogs. But take this to heart: Put all of your blogs on different IP blocks (ie completely different web hosts) and build links to your website from each of them. You’ll get a real good solid link base.

Read other posts about blogging:

• Is Your Blog Called “Fluffy”?
• How Blog Comments Help You SEO Your Website
• Linkbaiting: When Should You Do It?

Microsites - Microsites are, for some reason, quite controversial. Not all SEOs like them. They aren’t, however, “spammy” as some SEOs will accuse them of being, especially if you do them correctly. And they can build you some good quality links.

Read more posts about Microsites:

• Tracking For Adobe Flash Video (just a taste)
• Develop Microsites As A Part Of Your SEO Strategy
• Viral Marketing Through Microsites

I don’t endorse all forms of linkbuilding, but I do use - and encourage others to use - these three methods. They work. They’re acceptable from a search engine perspective. And they’re ethical.

It takes time to build links. But if you’re going to do it then you might as well do it right. Build your links with diversity in mind.

But what exactly is link diversity?

Link diversity is link building that incorporates a multi-faceted approach to building links so that inbound links to your website come from a variety of sources with a variety of PageRank authority and high amount of relevance. It’s true that high authority sites within your niche that are aged will send you better link juice than low authority new upstart websites that are not relevant. But why turn down a good link juice because it’s worth a nickel and not a quarter?

There are several ways to go about link building. You shouldn’t limit yourself to just one way. In order to build a diverse portfolio of links, you need to expand your horizons beyond directory submissions and article marketing. Yes, you should include those in your strategy, but don’t limit yourself to them. Get creative.

Some other ways you can build links back to your website include:

• Posting in forums
• Commenting on blogs
• Online press release campaign
• Being a guest blogger
• Social bookmarking
• Setting up social networking profiles
• Industry association memberships
• Getting your website reviewed
• Getting your book or other product reviewed
• Offering a testimonial to another site owner you’ve done business with

And I’m sure you can think of plenty more on your own. Don’t just settle for one method of link building. Diversify!

Are you busy trying to make your links look natural? Have you hired an search engine optimization company that sold you on a link building plan based on making your links appear natural? If so, fire them. Your links should not appear natural. They should be natural.

It happens all the time. Some new web entrepreneur or small business person trying to make the migration to online marketing reads an e-book, or a blog post, about how important links are and decide to do a little link building. Either they are going the budget route and doing it themselves or they hire a company to do it on the cheap under the guise that those links will appear like natural links. Uhm, guys, if your links are natural then they will look natural. Comprende?

It’s not hard. Actually, link building is fairly time consuming and arduous. But understanding the importance of it isn’t hard. And understand that au natural means more than mere appearances. You aren’t running for Miss America. You’re building your business. So don’t cut corners and don’t try to look like the most beautiful, intelligent, talented woman on the stage. Put the effort in and be the most beautiful, intelligent, talented pageant girl on the stage. See the difference?

Most of us consider optimization of links to be mostly about inbound links. While inbound links are important, they aren’t the only links that are important. You also need to optimize your internal links to prevent broken links, good traffic flow, and PR flow.

PR = PageRank, for the uninitiated.

Now, I’m not necessarily talking about your navigational menu, although that’s a good place to start. You want your links to be good, solid hypertext links, not dynamic links. For instance, those snazzy little drop-down menus on your nav bar? They don’t really help you. Sure, they look cool, but for search engine optimization purposes they are hurting you because they just won’t get crawled.

So step 1 of your link optimization strategy should be crawlability. Any links that don’t get crawled are a big ding in your search engine armor.

Also, be sure to use the proper anchor text for your internal links. That means using keywords that are appropriate for the linking page. And title attributes for your links can increase your optimization efforts as well.

When it comes to on-page optimization, don’t forget your internal links!

Do you know the difference between anchor text and a call to action? A call to action is any phrase that you use on your website or blog to get a user to do something. You can ask for a sale, a newsletter subscription, or just simply say “click here”. That’s a call to action.

Anchor text is using keywords within a hypertext link to assist the search engines in valuing that link for search marketing purposes. But can it serve as a call to action?

The short answer is, yes. In fact, using anchor text as a call to action is a powerful linking technique because not only do you get the search engine marketing benefits that go with using the anchor text, but if the link is an effective call to action then you’ll also increase your sales and marketing power. It will lead to increased conversions.

An example of a good link with a strong call to action and well-placed anchor text is right here below:

Notice the phrase “SEO Service”. That’s my anchor text. But “learn more about SEO” could just as well be the anchor text. It’s a phrase that some people, albeit fewer, might use to search for information online. And it’s a link. The call to action is “click here”. It’s clear what I want my reader to do. If they are interested in link building they should click the link to learn how to do it. Anyone interested in learning about link building is promised a benefit. And that’s how you use anchor text as a call to action.

Here’s another interesting new angle on a product that may be a good one, but since I haven’t used it I can’t vouch for it. But the interesting thing about this article is a startling statistic:

- nearly 15 billion links (~3% of all links) are using the nofollow attribute

- over 11 billion of those were internal (73% of instances of nofollow)

What’s this mean? Most of the people using nofollow as an attribute are doing it for PageRank sculpting reasons. They’re not selling links at all, which is the original reason Google introduced nofollow so that link sellers could sell links and not be penalized for selling PageRank. Instead, it’s being used differently. Three quick questions:

• Does this mean link sellers are still selling PageRank?
• Is the PageRank sculpting practice all that effective for those webmasters who are using it?
• Will Google kill the nofollow attribute?

If you’ve been reading this blog the last few days then you know that Google’s Matt Cutts has publicly stated that PageRank sculpting is not all that effective. Is that just Googlespeak for “don’t do it guys”? Maybe Google really doesn’t like PageRank sculpting and their just trying to find a nice way of discouraging webmasters from doing it. Nevertheless, it appears their efforts aren’t working. People are doing it anyway.

That leads to the question, Will Google kill it? Will nofollow be trashed as a failed experiment? Would webmasters using PageRank do better in the long run by not using it? What do you think? Is Google on the verge of pissing off a lot of big site owners again with another change to its algorithms or will this just blow over as another development in Web history?

Matt Cutts on PageRank sculpting:

A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

This blog post may be about PageRank sculpting, but it’s really about something else: The value of outbound linking.

Many site owners believe they should just link to themselves internally. That’s not very smart, actually. Outbound linking really helps you in a number of ways.

• If done smartly, it can increase your PageRank
• Again, if done smartly, your human visitors will see you as someone who is an authority who is willing to link to other sites if they have value
• You’ll be seen by search engine bots and humans as a high value site
• Your site becomes more social and you’ll get more participation from others
• Outbound links can sometimes leave an automatic trackback on another website, which can deliver additional traffic to your site

Reserving all of your links to internal pages may seem like a smart thing to do, but it’s really not. The linking strategy is one that ecompasses a variety of internal and outbound links that shows your site visitors that you are willing to share useful and valuable high authority resources with them.

When it comes to link building there are a lot of ideas floating around. Most of them you’ve probably heard of:

• Article marketing
• Directory submissions
• Link baiting
• Online publicity
• Social media marketing
• Give away a blog theme
• Throw a contest

You get the picture. They’re all over the place. And these ideas have been rehashed over and over again. But I’ve got 5 link building methods that I’ll mention below that don’t get mentioned very often and they are really cool and unique to implement. Try them out!

• Start a microblog - Seriously, I’m not talking about Twitter or Tumblr here. I’m talking about a standalone miniature blog. WordPress theme and all. For $10 a year you can build a little blog site, throw an article or two on it and link it back to your website then totally forget about it. When that site is 10 years old you’ll have one awesome inbound link.
• Post in .gov and .edu forums - It’s no secret that .gov and .edu domain names are really valuable. The links in particular are really valuable. I mean, really valuable.
• Be a guest blogger - This one is starting to pick up steam, but it’s not quite to the point of being real popular yet. Blog for another blog in your niche. You’ll get a link.
• Join Rateitall - Post a review, get rated, and rate others’ reviews. Get links.
• Start a petition - Encourage people in your niche to sign it.

There are plenty more ways to build links. In fact, Carl Ocab has 69 link building ideas right here. Check them out.

This morning we talked about anchor text and how to choose the right keywords. But anchor text is more than just keywords in a link. Anchor text is also a call to action. You want the user to click the link, right?

Don’t assume that just because you put a link in your text that it will be clicked. Not all links are clicked. There are number of factors that into whether or not a link is clicked.

• Link placement within the text
• Number of competing links
• Number of links on the page
• The text within the link anchor text
• Promise of benefit at the other end

If you have too many links on the page then you rest assured that not all of them will be clicked. Most people have better things to do than run through your entire list of links. You can count on some of them not getting clicked. But if the purpose is to provide an inbound link to another page and you don’t care if that link gets clicked, OK, no problem. But if you are building links to drive traffic then too many links on the page is a big deal.

Another thing to consider is where the links are placed on the page. Generally, near the beginning and at the end of content is best. If you bury your links in the middle of your content it can be effective as long as you don’t have too many links on the page and it’s visible. But keep in mind that readers who are interested in reading the page may not have an interest in being diverted.

One of the most important things, though, is the call to action: The text within the anchor text. If it is a strong call to action then placement may not matter, but link placement AND call to action together are the best combination. A good strong call to action at the end of a page of content can attract a large number of click-throughs, especially if your topic is popular and you are getting targeted traffic.

Yes, anchor text as call to action can be as important, or more important, than building links as inbound links.

So you know you need anchor text and you know how to create links with anchor text. But how do you know which keywords to use for your anchor text as part of your on site optimization strategy?

There’s really no hard and fast rule. But I can give you some things to think about.

No. 1, if you think about your anchor text as a call to action, it’s a little easier. But the problem with using every link as a call to action is that you don’t always use the best keyword for the situation. However, if you get the click-through then it’s worth it, right?

Different links server different purposes. For instance, an affiliate link has a different reason for being than a link from one page to another on your website. Those internal links are for navigational purposes. The anchor text in those cases should be the most important keyword to describe the page being linked to.

Let’s say Page A on your site is about carburetors. Page B is about intake valves. You sell auto parts. Depending on the purpose of the link, your anchor text could read as any of the following:

• Learn more about intake valves
• Buy your intake valve here
• Intake valves
• Why your intake valve is rusty
• How to replace the intake valve

There are any number of other anchor texts you could use depending on what you want to accomplish with your page on intake valves and the anchor text leading to it, but you can see that the words and phrases you use serve as a call to action in many cases. If you just use a phrase like “intake valve” that doesn’t say much about what’s on the other side of that link. But if you use another phrase, one that describes what the link clicker will actually see when they arrive at their destination, then you’ll likely get more click-throughs. You’ll certainly get more qualified and targeted click-throughs.

If your link is an offsite link pointing into one of the pages of your site then you’ll need to decide whether you want to get the link juice for your important anchor text or if you want to go for the strong call to action. If possible, do both. But if you want the best anchor text link juice then use a keyword that is associated with the page being linked to. The best way to match keywords for anchor text is to ensure that your primary keyword is in your URL, the title of your page, and used throughout your page as well as anchor text for any inbound links.

There is a lot more that could be said for anchor text, but that’s a quick down and dirty in a nutshell.

You’ve heard the derogatories: Blackhat, Scumbag, SEO. In some people’s eyes they are all the same thing. But are they?

Let’s face it. Mike McDonald has a point. SEOs are manipulators. But is that really a bad thing?

I do agree with his conclusion in the end. It’s not certain that Google would penalize a high profile search engine optimization expert, or any SEO, for promoting a product that happened to have resulted in a lot of inbound links for the SEO or his sponsor. It’s not certain they wouldn’t either. But when it comes to paid links, well, if you get caught paying cash for those then Google will nab you. We know that for certain. But, here’s the pickle. Only if you get caught.

Now I’m not saying you should go out and buy a lot of links under the radar. There are enough people out there recommending that. But it does beg the question, What exactly is a paid link?

Is it a paid link if you receive a product as a gift just so you can blog about it? Is it a paid link if you are “loaned” a product so you can blog about it? What if you trade services and that results in a big inbound link pay off for you - intended or not? Would that constitute a paid link campaign?

I think these are questions that a lot of us would like Google to answer. But Google doesn’t always come out with those kinds of answers very forthrightly. And who can blame them? The bad guys - I mean, we SEO types - we generally jump on such news and exploit it for everything that it’s worth. Can you blame us? That’s our job.

When it comes to link anchor text it is best to use it in moderation. One of the corollaries of link building is what we call link diversity. It’s the idea that you want your links coming from a variety of sources, but also you want them to use a variety of anchor text. The search engines, particularly Google, call it natural link building.

The idea is to produce an effect that looks natural. In other words, if you left the link building to its own devices, would people you have no control or sway over link to you naturally the way that you are trying to do it, using the same kind of anchor text and the same page sources?

It is really difficult to “look natural”, but rather easy to be natural. If you just do it without trying anything fancy then it can seem as natural as gravity. But some people try too hard.

Make a list of your most important key phrases. Those phrases can be your anchor text.But you don’t want the same anchor text from every source you link from. You want to vary it. So divide up the sources that you are targeting for links and assign an anchor text to each one. Write your content for that anchor text and send it out. The site owner will either reject it or accept it. If they reject it, it’s no big deal. You do have other sites to target. But if your content is accepted then go with that.

It’s really that simple. Over time, targeting a variety of anchor texts will cause your pages to rise in rankings for those phrases. You have to be patient.

If you’re wanting to build links then you might have read in a few places that you can build something called “link bait”. Link bait is just a fancy name for content that is so good that it attracts links from other websites. Those links, being relevant and from authoritative websites, will give your website a boost in the search engines.

Make no mistake, link bait is one of the most over hyped concepts in search engine optimization. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist or doesn’t work. I am saying that a lot of emphasis is put on it that probably shouldn’t be. I’m also convinced that the best way to build links over the long haul is simply to focus on creating great content.

If you consistently produce outstanding content on your blog and website then you’ll attract the kind of links that you want. Instead of trying to produce content that will attract links, try to write great content that will attract readers. Your readers will link to you if they like your content. Over time you’ll begin to attract more readers and they in turn will do their part to link to you as well. But the links don’t come because you focus on getting links. They come because you focus on delivering great content to your readers.