“Googling” things has become the default first step in our quest to find answers to any questions we have.

Because those questions include things like “where do I find this product?” and “who can help me fix this?” businesses have recognized that paid search is a great way to connect to potential customers.

Also, paid search allows businesses to easily monitor how effective their Internet marketing spend is.

Noting these advantages many businesses have created Adwords accounts, but due to some common mistakes, they may be unknowingly reducing the effectiveness of their online campaigns.

Here are 7 BIG Mistakes that should be addressed in order to maximize the return from your Adwords account…

1. Leaving the Content Network On

Content targeting, which is active by default, is what Google uses to match the keywords in your adgroups to thousands of publishers within the Google network, known as Adsense.

Instead of relying only on relevant queries in Google to return your ad, it places your ads on sites within the network that contain content it sees as relevant to your keywords.

For example, if you are a snack food company and are targeting “mixed nuts” in Adwords, Google may place your ad next to sites with recipes that require nuts and articles that explain the “health benefits of nuts” which are somewhat relevant, but it may also place your ad on sites with articles about “peanut allergies” which is not relevant at all.

Leaving this feature on is an easy way to spend a lot of money fast without reaching qualified customers. The simplest way to manage the content network is to turn it off.

If you choose to use content targeting it is very important that you create separate campaigns for just the content network so you can adjust the budget (discussed more below). You should also start out with a smaller budget and test the effectiveness before allocating more money to this method.

2. Not Implementing a Geo-targeting Strategy

If you do not create location-specific campaigns, then your ads will be served at the national level by default, and you may lose money from users who click your ads that live outside of your reach.

If you are a local plumbing company based in the Chicagoland area, it would make sense to allocate your budget to people searching for plumbers in that region instead of people all over the country. Needless to say, a Californian with a leaky faucet is not going to be the ideal customer for a Chicago plumbing company.

3. Not Tracking Conversions

The only way to determine if your paid search efforts are successful or not is if you are tracking conversions or the action you want the customer to take on your Web site. This may be obvious, but we see businesses make this mistake more often than one would think. Conversions can be anything from a purchase to a form submission, and you are not limited to tracking just one.

If you are a service company that does not sell anything online, then you want your ads to direct the user to a landing page with a form that they can submit with all of their information. If conversion tracking is setup properly, you will know exactly which keyword led to the form submission instead of just knowing how many total forms were submitted.

Knowing this information then allows you to go back to your campaigns and adjust budgets and bids according to which campaigns and keywords are bringing you the most conversions for the lowest cost.

NOTE: Before going onto Big Mistake #4, it might help to discuss how keywords, ad groups, and campaigns are organized within Adwords.

If you look at the tree structure below, you will see there are multiple keywords within each ad group, and multiple ad groups within each campaign. You can have as little as 1 or as many as 1000 ad groups within each campaign.

You want to group similar keywords together within ad groups to create targeted ads, and you want to group related ad groups within campaigns to allow for proper budget adjustment.

Looking at the example structure below: if you realize that a lot more of the people that are searching for “London homes” are converting compared to the other cities, then you can create a separate campaign for London in addition to the “UK Cities” campaign and add more budget to the London one.

4. Not Having Enough Campaigns

A very common mistake that we see is that all of the ad groups in the account are confined to just one or two campaigns. This is a problem because budget is adjusted at the campaign level. If everything is in one campaign and some ad groups are outperforming others, then there is no way to put more money towards the groups that are converting more without also funding the poorly performing ad groups.

If we see keywords that are performing well, we may even create a campaign just for the one keyword so we can garner the maximum amount of conversions possible from that word.

5. Not Having Enough Ad Groups

Organizing similar keywords into multiple ad groups gives you a better opportunity to have higher click through rates (CTRs) and quality scores.

The quality score is a rating from Google that ranges from 1 (not relevant) to 10 (highly relevant), and the main reason you want that score to be high is that it will enable you to bid lower for higher placements.

If your ad groups have too many keywords that are unrelated, then Google will not know which words it should base its relevancy rating upon and your CTR will most likely be lower leading to a low quality score. Generally if your quality scores are around 7 or higher you are in good shape.

6. Not Having Multiple Ads

It is best practice to have two or three ads per ad group to allow for A-B testing and optimization. If you only have one ad you are missing out on the opportunity to test different messaging, and to serve more relevant ads based on search queries.

For example: There is a sporting goods store and they have a 50% off sale on baseball bats, and are also offering free shipping on all of their products. If someone searches for “discount baseball bat” they know to serve a text ad that has copy about their “50% off discount on bats” whereas they may want to place a text ad with “free shipping on all bats” for the search query “baseball bats with free shipping.” If they find that one of the two ads is receiving more clicks and conversions, then they may want to modify the other ad to try and increase its effectiveness as well.

7. Using Only Broad Match Type for Keywords

When you are setting up the keywords in Adwords, you can choose between three different match types: broad, exact, and phrase. Google uses the match type to determine when to serve your ad.

Broad matches will give you the most placements because your ad will be served any time your key word(s) appear in a search query in any order. Exact match will serve your ads only when the query matches your keyword, and Phrase match looks for your keywords in the exact order they appear within search queries even if the queries have other words in them.

In most cases you can safely avoid the broad match type altogether, but it should never be the only match type you are using. If someone is searching for “red laces for shoes” and you have “red shoe” as your keyword using broad match type, you will serve an impression and potentially pay for a click if the unqualified user decides to browse your site at that point. It is very unlikely that the click from that user will lead to a sale.

If you do elect to use broad match type for some of your keywords, then you must use negative keywords (like “laces” going back to the example above) to prevent your ad from being served to unqualified users.

Addressing these seven big Adwords mistakes will enable you to
run an effective paid search campaign for your business.

It is important to remember that you must continually optimize your campaigns, ad groups, text ads, and keywords based on your return on ad spend (ROAS) and conversion goals.

About the Author
Jon Morris was recognized as one of Chicago’s top 30 entrepreneurs under 30 by the Chicago Sun-Times, and was the recipient of the Outstanding Academic Award for graduating first in his class at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Over the last 14 years Jon has become a thought leader in the Internet marketing industry, and is currently the CEO of Rise Interactive, a company he founded in 2004. Rise Interactive is a Chicago SEO and Internet Marketing company that is focused on finding innovative ways to keep its clients ahead of the competition.

Before you start any marketing for your home business these days, you need to do your keyword research. And while there is a lot of information about keyword research, many still struggle choosing the right way or the right tool to find profitable keywords.

First of all, let’s remember that while it’s important to do your keyword analysis, it’s more important to take action! No amount of keywords will help you grow your business if all you do is keyword research…

With that said, today we’ll see how we can use Shopping.com to enhance our quest to find the right keywords and phrases for a specific niche. We all know and use the free WordTracker & Google keyword tools, and those are great, but there are other ways to see your niche from a different view.

Shopping.com is a great place to research physical product keywords. Let’s walk through how you go about finding your key phrases. Once you are at the Shopping.com site, click on the “See all” link on the top navigation. As soon as you do that, you’ll be taken to a list of the products sold at this site (as seen in the image here).

Let’s say we are looking for knitting keywords: we click on the link that says “Craft Supplies”. On the next page you’ll see “Knitting and Crocheting Type” with several categories specific to knitting, and if you scroll a little bit you’ll see a subtitle for “Craft Supply Type” with a link going to “Knitting and Crocheting”. All those are starting points for keyword research: those are things that people buy now.

And if you want to dig deeper, you can do that. Click on the link that says “Yarn” and on the next page, at the top, you’ll see some very specific key phrases that have lots of searches.

Now go to the free WordTracker keyword tool and see how many times these key phrases are searched for. I did just a small sample for you here.

• caron simply soft yarn 82
• sock yarn 187
• red heart super saver yarn 32
• ribbon yarn 46
• bulky yarn 37

Of course, don’t stop there. As you search these keywords on WT, you’ll see many more variations for your new found keyword phrases. The possibilities are endless, and all you need to do once you finish your keyword research is to start using them: write some articles for your blog, some for distribution, check some of your older posts and add tags to them, create a Squidoo page, a Hub page, etc.

–>Affiliate marketer Adriana Copaceanu has been successfully marketing online since 2004, and recently decided to share her Online Business Journey She loves doing keyword research so much she offers some up for free on her blog every Friday.

I don’t actually use anything, so I never have a good answer. My standard response is:

“I check the top 10 results at the 3 major search engines, searching the keyword phrase I’m trying to rank for. If my page is not there- in the top 10 results – I close my browser and get back to work!”

I was talking to Saku of SEO Rank Monitor last week, and he offered to let me take his online tool for a test drive and check it out. While there are several programs and tools that let you check your rankings, this one is different because it can interact directly with your Google Analytics account…

From a review on Yoast:

…uses the Google Analytics API to combine rankings data with visitor data, showing you what the difference really is between position 1 and position 2. It’s also the fastest rankings tracker I’ve ever seen, ranking a few dozen keywords for me in a few minutes, and then on a daily basis after that, giving some awesome ranking charts…

They offer a full feature tour of the SEO Rank Monitor dashboard, and a 30-day free trial to let you check it out before you decide to sign up for one of their two packages. The best value is the Pro Package which allows you to track up to 10 domains and 2500 keywords.

All of the tracking & ranking data is stored remotely on their server. That allows you to access it all over the world by logging in from any web browser.

What makes SEO Rank Monitor different – and better – than other SEO tools out there is the option to connect it to your Google Analytics account. You can then retrieve data about your visitors for all your tracked keywords…

In addition to tracking your own keywords and campaigns, the dashboard also includes a Competitor Monitor which allows you to keep up with the success of your competition. Or easily find keywords with little or no competition.

All of the stats and data are laid out nicely in visual, easy-to-read charts & graphs with the option to export into other formats.

I took Saku up on the offer to give it a test drive, and logged in to one of his accounts. At a glance I could see where keyword phrases were ranking across Google, Yahoo and Bing. I could also tell which keyword phrases were moving in the SERPs. Specifically which terms were moving up in the results, and which phrases were moving down.

The charts load quite fast, and it’s very easy to navigate.

Inside the Analytics Monitor, it gives you a Keyword Value. You can look over this chart and see where you rank for various keyword phrases – and the Keyword Value tells you the number of click through’s you can expect with a number one ranking for each of those keywords.

Definitely cool, and a tool I’ll be checking out more. Give it a test drive with their 30-day trial and let me know what you think!

-> http://www.seorankmonitor.com

Best,

Disclosure: this post was sponsored by SEO Rank Monitor

Let’s face it: Many of us have websites so we can make money. As much as we’d like to call ourselves savvy communicators, prolific content creators, or detail-oriented designers, our main purpose for being online is earning a buck.

Optimizing our sites for search traffic is a means to achieving that goal. But in order for us to know if our efforts are paying off, we need to track our SEO progress. Here are the five best measures of that progress…

1. Conversion rate is an important, if not the most important, metric for evaluating SEO efforts. It is defined as the number of website visitors who complete a desired goal out of the total number of visitors. Sometimes that goal is getting people to give you their contact info. Sometimes it’s getting people to download one of your white papers. Sometimes it’s getting them to make a payment. Whatever it is, it’s a step in your sales process. An easy way to track goal conversion data is through Google Analytics.

Google provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up goals for analysis.

2. Site traffic is also very important when it comes to measuring SEO progress. Your site may have a high conversion rate, but if only a handful of people are visiting it each week you likely aren’t getting very many sales. There are many ways to get more traffic on your site, including submitting your site to search engines, asking other sites to link to you, and using relevant keywords. If people like what you have to offer, they will come back. They will also tell their friends about you, and those friends will tell their friends about you, and so on. Google Analytics tracks site visits and page views.

3. Number and quality of links is another key metric for evaluating SEO improvement. Google attaches much importance to these factors in determining which sites appear at the top of its search engine results page (SERP). While it is helpful to link outward, and to other pages on your site, you benefit most from having other sites link to you. There are various ways you can get sites to link your way. Those include syndicating a press release, reviewing products on Amazon, and creating a page about your company in Wikipedia. Creating regular content that’s useful to your audience, especially via a corporate blog, can also be very helpful.

You can track links to your site by downloading a free service from Majestic-SEO.

4. To evaluate your SEO progress you also want to keep tabs on how your site ranks in Google and other search engines. Ideally your site will appear on search engines’ first results page when your target keywords are queried. That’s a goal worth pursuing, considering many people don’t click past the first page. The website SEO Book offers a free tool that tracks your rankings on Google.com, international versions of Google, Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft Bing.

5. Bounce rate and time spent on pages are two related metrics also worth measuring. Bounce rate is the ratio of the number of visitors to a site who view just one page to the total number of site visitors. If you have a high bounce rate, your site isn’t engaging visors. You also aren’t captivating readers if they are spending little time on your pages.

You can use Google Analytics to get these measurements. If you are disappointed with your bounce rate you might need to revisit your landing page’s headlines and copy, and consider whether they address the keywords you’re attempting to target. If readers are spending little time on particular pages, you should probably focus on updating and improving the quality of content on those pages.

About the author: Larry Kim is the Founder and VP of Products for WordStream. Follow him on Twitter or subscribe to the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog. Larry lives in Cambridge, MA.

To find these buyers that are searching in your market, you simply include single keyword modifiers with your primary keywords when doing your keyword research.

Below are a list of modifiers, along with specific keyword phrase examples, which should generate even more ideas for you to test:

• buy
• purchase
• shop
• order

This helps you find long tail keyword phrases used by people who have an obvious intent to buy. Examples include:

- order flowers online for delivery (79)
- purchase old movies (430)
- buy movies online (104)
- buy mini muffin pans (3, 448)
- shop nascar (790)

The number out to the right is the approximate number of searches per day according to WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool.

Other modifiers I try include:

• shipping
• get
• online
• coupons
• deal
• delivery
• best
• comparison
• review

Again, some specific examples of keyword phrases using these qualifiers:

- hearing aid comparisons (671)
- free shipping on clothes (192)
- free shipping office supplies (81)
- digital slr camera reviews (235)
- who makes the best mp3 player (586)
- best way to get a software engineering degree online (118)
- delivery of wine as a gift (366)

As you can see, these keyword phrases are used by people who are searching online to help them with their buying decision. These are phrases with Commercial Intent (CI), and the phrases you should be targeting to make sales online.

Also See: The Products People Are Searching For Online

Informational Keyword Modifiers

I also use modifiers to find keyword phrases where people are searching for free information, which helps for creating link-building content and info products.

• free
• download
• tips
• how
• how to

Also See: Ideas for How-To Content and How-To Info Products Products

Using modifiers in your keyword research will help you come up with the specific content and products that your market is searching for online. Whether you are creating info products, building an email list with an informational opt-in incentive, or creating “money pages” as a merchant or an affiliate, these modifiers can help you bring in the most qualified visitors to your offers.

Best,

p.s. You can use any number of keyword research tools. I use WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool, and simply keep it open in a new tab. I refer to it no less than a dozen times a day to find phrases when: starting a new forum thread, writing a blog post or article, creating an email newsletter, etc.

Dislosure: I am an affiliate for WordTracker. The link given above is a referral link, but the tool is 100% free – not a trial offer. I have been using the free tool for years with no requirements other than the occasional captcha screen.

Anyone can write words and create content. But writing SEO Content that converts visitors into buyers does take a bit of skill & intuition.

It’s easy enough to write optimized content to get rankings & website traffic. But traffic alone doesn’t pay the bills. You want to write content that attracts buyers and makes sales…

“I’m researching keywords, writing content, getting backlinks, have some good rankings and I’m even getting traffic – but still no sales. Help!”

All Long Tail Keywords Are Not Created Equal

Long Tail Keyword Phrases are phrases with 3 or more words. In some of the broader niches, a 3-word phrase is barely considered “long tail”. The phrase will be a very specific search, compared to the usual broad searches.

So it’s less about the number (“3-5 words”) and more how specific the search is.

These more specific phrases convert at a higher rate than general search queries, because the searcher knows exactly what they want. Writing content or creating pages around these long tail keyword phrases gives you a better opportunity to create a strong message to market match.

Imagine the difference between creating a page for “shoes” and one for “jimmy choo bridal shoes”. Even though “shoes” gets a lot more searches, it’s too general to target. You have no idea what kind of shoes your website visitors want to buy.

To give you an example, I recently wrote a blog post for an 8-word long tail keyword phrase. The phrase is How Can I Promote My Website For Free? which gets approximately 235 searches a day according to WordTracker.

That blog post ranks in the top 10 on Google for that phrase.

Mission accomplished, right?

Commercial Keyword Phrases vs Informational Keyword Phrases

In the 8-word phrase I gave above as an example, there are two words that peg it as an informational search: how and free. The searcher is obviously looking for free information (credit card tucked firmly away in wallet).

Compare this to a phrase like “buy online advertising” (15 searches/day). Or “should I buy a website template” (30 searches/day). These searchers are trying to make a buying decision (credit card close by, if not in hand).

While it’s tempting to use long tail keywords with higher search volume, if your goal is to make sales then you want to target the commercial keyword phrases. And don’t let low search volume deter you – write the content once, and let it continue to work for you for years. It is worth it. If your target market is searching for it, you are doing them a disservice by not ‘responding’ to that query with content.

It’s not impossible to convert visitors who are looking for information, into buyers. But it is harder – and you’ll see a much lower conversion rate. When you are writing content specifically to promote a product or to make sales, you want to target and optimize for the commercial keyword phrases.

The main point is that you analyze the keyword phrases from the searcher’s perspective, and determine the intent of the search. What is it they are most likely looking for? Your goal as a content publisher is to offer them exactly that.

Using Informational Keyword Phrases

When writing SEO Content, you want to make use of both Informational and Commercial Keyword Phrases. You’ll focus on the latter for creating content that contains a strong call-to-action for a specific product or service. But info-searches have their place in your web content development plan as well.

It takes both types of content to fully serve your market.

Informational search queries can be used to create content or copy for:

• Opt-in Incentives (reports, guides, etc)
• Newsletter Titles
• Internal links for your “money pages”
• Articles for Article Marketing
• Forum Topics (for inbound links & networking)
• Squidoo Lenses

…etc. In addition to being a great source for content ideas that can generate quality inbound links, the info keyword phrases are good to use on a blog where you are trying to build a loyal readership or establish a reputation as a market leader.

But when it comes to making sales… target the keyword phrases that show obvious intent to buy.

This is really only a slight shift in mindset when you are doing keyword research. We’ve been taught to focus on the search volume, analyze the competition in the search results, and if it looks like an “easy rank” then create a page or blog post and get backlinks.

It’s easy enough to stay busy going through the motions and create keyword-optimized content that ranks well. But if you’re getting good search engine rankings, and you’re starting to get traffic to that content, and still not making sales – this (the intent of the search) may very well be the missing ingredient.

Continue to target your market through their queries for info, but use that content strategically to build up your “money pages”. And put a strong focus on creating commercial content for those in your market that are specifically searching for help in their buying decision.

We’ve actually discussed SEO Content & Long Tail Keywords before in great detail, but over the weekend at the NAMS Workshop I discovered it still wasn’t super clear for everyone. Understandable – it actually took me awhile to wrap my head around the concept as well. But boy did it ever make a difference!

Here are two recent posts on this topic that contain even more examples and ideas:

SEO Content | Affiliate Marketing Tips

I put together 4 downloads for those that wanted guides to work with after my presentation at NAMS. You’ll find both of those posts as PDF Files, along with 2 others, in the protected post. The password is “nams3″.

Study the tutorials & posts, look over your own keyword content strategy, and then let me know if you have any questions – you can leave a comment below. Include the link to your site in the comment field for your URL if you would like me to take a look as well.

Best,

p.s. Next we’ll discuss Keyword Qualifiers to help you identify and cater to the buyers in your niche. Subscribe below to receive email notification of this and more great tutorials that will help you take your online business to the next level:

Google Caffeine was set to roll out with the New Year, just after the holidays. This is basically a new version of Google that will increase size, indexing speed, accuracy, etc. Matt Cutts explains Google Caffeine in this video:

I haven’t yet read anything definitive on how this may affect SEO, if at all, but will definitely keep my ear to the ground. For now it’s safe to say that good site structure, quality content and relevant inbound links are still the key.

As Matt mentions in the video, the Caffeine update will allow Google to handle the power and speed of Real Time Search…

Real Time Search

Real Time Search is probably the biggest and most exciting update for most online marketers, though Rand Fishkin predicts it will fade away in 2010.

Google describes it as a way to discover breaking news on the web with real-time updates from news, blogs and social networks. They put out this video earlier this month to demonstrate Real Time Search results:

What does this mean to you? As a marketer, you can now easily trump the current top results with a simple tweet or a new blog post… This is huge.

Tweets are showing up in Google search within minutes, if not seconds.

If you are not already actively blogging and using Twitter & Facebook, now would be the time to start. Now as in right now

Site Hierarchy Displayed in Search Results

Last month Google announced that site hierarchies would be displayed in SERPs, to help searchers see relevant information about each individual result.

This is similar to what we call breadcrumb navigation on websites. Here is an example given by Google:

What does this mean for you? Take some time to examine your site structure. Use categories to group micro-topics (or sets of products) on your blog or website, and make sure your categories are descriptive.

Best,

p.s. Still unsure about SEO? See Web Page Optimization (free tutorial & checklist) and download the free SEO Fast Start guide by Dan Thies

It’s been years since I ran campaigns on Google Adwords (pay-per-click advertising) but I’ve taken a renewed interest in it. In your post, you talk about Quality Score. This is new since the last time I ran campaigns. Can you explain what it is, and how it’s calculated?

For this one, I couldn’t say it any better than Google itself, so here is their definition:

The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance.

In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

In addition to the Quality Score of the merchant’s landing page, if you’re promoting a direct affiliate link, you need a good Quality Score on your own landing pages if you’re sending traffic to your own domain first, right?

Any tips for creating a good affiliate landing page that will get a good Quality Score?

Absolutely. Creating a good affiliate landing page is all about quality, relevancy, value and user experience. As long as your pages provide good content, which will eventually impress your visitor to take action, you are on your way to a good Quality Score.

Most people want to write a couple short paragraphs and give an affiliate link: that that won’t cut it most of the time. One of the best ways to create a great landing page is to involve your visitor with a well crafted “story” that uses your keywords and involves them emotionally.

The link(s) on your landing page need to take your visitor to a page that’s closely related to the keyword/key phrase they entered through. And of course, an easy and explicit navigation that takes your visitor straight to the item they were searching for helps too.

Don’t forget to include a link to your privacy policy.

I like that you discussed price points in your blog post. While higher price points bring larger affiliate commissions, I used to choose some of the “low hanging fruit” or lower priced products/offers – and some of those had great conversion rates.

Is there a minimum that you work with, or do you analyze campaigns on a case-by-case basis?

That’s right: some of the low hanging fruit will give you success much easier, since your key phrase is more targeted, the cost is lower, and not everyone bothers with them.

With that said, I usually try to look for products that will give me a commission of $10 or more. The work involved in starting a campaign is the same regardless of how much or how little you’ll make, so I might as well shoot for larger commissions.

In the mean time, I don’t shy away from promoting a lower priced offer, if I think it will convert well.

What are some of the first things you do when you notice a campaign tanking, or not turning a profit? Do you immediately give up on it, or are there other things you try or test before quitting?

It depends: if I had 300 clicks for that campaign and no conversion, I usually give it up. But, if I made a sale in the first 300 clicks, I’ll try and see how I can improve it.

For example if I see a lot of clicks for a certain keyword, but no sales, I’ll pause that keyword and let the campaign run.

If a campaign has been doing well, and all of a sudden tanks, I’ll immediately look at the merchant’s page where I am sending traffic. More than likely, the merchant removed the page, or made another change (like add AdSense or other advertising), and that’s the reason for the “tank”.

I used to track my campaigns VERY closely – even with a daily budget set up. Do you turn your new campaigns off if you’re going to be away from the computer for the day, or even while you’re sleeping?

I try to stay away from starting new campaigns at night, since for the first few hours I keep a close eye on all my campaigns.

But if the campaign has been online for a few days and it’s somewhat predictable, I don’t turn it off. If the campaign has been online for a while, and I know what to expect, I don’t worry about it even when I go on vacation.

But, if you are worried, you can either stop it completely, or you can schedule when to turn it on and off. Google has an ad scheduling feature, where you can schedule when you want your ads to run.

Thanks, Adriana – very helpful!

Be sure to read Adriana’s original blog post on how to make money with Adwords, and feel free to leave her questions about PPC below in the comment section.

Best,

p.s. Perry Marshall has a brand new 2010 Edition of the Definitive Guide to Google Adwords. He has long been THE authority on mastering Adwords with higher CTR and conversion rates. A wise investment if you’re considering PPC advertising, and a guide I’ll be studying again myself before I dive back in with my campaigns.

WordStream interviews link building expert, Debra Mastaler
Interviews are one of my favorite post-styles to read. I particularly liked Debra’s answer on whether social media sites make traditional link-building an outdated practice. I use social media to locate opportunities just like she describes…

101 Ways to Get Links to your Website
A great list to scan for ideas & resources!

25 Link Building Tactics to Improve Blog Search Engine Rankings
Excellent checklist style post for content marketing…

Mining 31,500,000 Free Links For The Taking
This, my friends, is what you call opportunity. Brilliant share!

Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics for 2009
Post includes 7 internal link building strategies, 10 easy link building starters, 12 old school link building techniques, 12 places to submit your URL, 12 ways to make people write about you, 12 common business tactics, 4 important considerations… and ZERO advanced link building strategies.
(lol- I love how he wrapped this one up!)

Link Request Strategies for Blogs, Edu’s & .Gov’s: Respect My Authoritah!
Melanie gives great practical advice, example emails, do’s & donts – a great read.

Enjoy

Best,

p.s. Know more great blog posts about Link Building? Share them with me in the comments section below and I’ll had them to the post…

In this post I’ll give you 7 simple one way link building strategies that give your Link Reputation a nice little boost, and also bring in highly targeted traffic all on their own.

One Way Links are valuable because they are viewed as truer votes towards your web page. The exception is sponsored links, or one way links that are obviously purchased. There are a number of ways that Google can tell this, which is one of the reasons that a permanent inbound link tends to gain more weight over time.

Easy One Way Link Building Strategies

The goal is to get permanent one way links pointing to your web pages, whether that be the main page of your site or internal pages or blog posts on your domain. You need a good number of quality deep links to those internal pages to boost your overall Link Reputation. Following are 7 very easy ways to achieve that…

1. Interviews

Interviews come in all shapes and sizes, and you can really get creative with this one. A traditional audio interview on a webinar, podcast or online radio show will usually get you a link on the host’s site and also a mention to their mailing list (even better if those newsletters are archived online).

I prefer text interviews on relevant blogs, as they give you a high quality contextual link from a relevant content page. This can be done by answering a series of questions via email that are then published on the blog.

Another option is Q&A style, which is fun and easy.

Examples:
Advantage & Disadvantage of Outsourcing Q&A Style
Lynn Terry of ClickNewz an interview Text Interview
Life Change: Interview with Lynn Terry Text Interview
On Becoming a Market Leader Audio Interview
Lynn Terry Affiliate Marketing Success BlogTalkRadio Interview

2. Guest Blogging

Interviews are great, but guest blogging is even better for one way link building. Why? Because as the author of the content on the page that is linking to your page, you have full control over that link.

You can choose the keyword phrase to optimize the blog post, choose the page you want to link to that is relevant to that topic, and use your preferred anchor text in that backlink. And if that wasn’t reason enough to start guest blogging, you’re also putting yourself in front of an established readership in your niche!

Examples:
My Guest Post on Problogger
Guest Post on ClickNewz by Danny Cutts

3. Private Paid Link

One thing you really want to stay away from is programs or schemes designed to create your one way links, or text link brokers that sell you one way links.

These programs and brokers are really frowned upon by the major search engines and could hurt your Link Reputation rather than improving it.

This being the case, I still purchase text links from time to time – I just do it smarter. And I never purchase a temporary link, but rather a permanent contextual inbound link on a relevant content page or blog post.

How do I manage to do that? Simple: I offer bloggers a one-time payment to blog about a specific link on my site. Most of the “pay per post” brokers pay their bloggers $5-$15 for blog posts, so that price range is suitable – particularly for B-list or C-list bloggers. I usually use Job Boards on forums to make the offer.

I do not specify anchor text, give them more than one page or blog post to choose from, and just request that they blog about the topic and link back to the page/post. I do this because I want link variation, and because I’m buying “advertising” or “buzz” – rather than specifically buying text links.

Never use a broker. Do it yourself, or hire a virtual assistant to manage it. Period.

4. Article Marketing

Submitting articles to article directories is similar to guest blogging in that you have complete control over the content and the link. This is a great method that people have been using successfully for years.

In addition to getting indirect rankings when your submitted article ranks well, and then funnels traffic into your site, your article can also get republished all over the web – resulting in numerous quality one way links.

Sidenote: A lot of us – newbies and experienced marketers alike – are taking Jeff Herrings new article marketing e-course. It’s cheap and it’s awesome – super great investment to really nail this strategy.

Examples:
My latest article on EzineArticles.com
Quick Start To Setting Up Your First Blog Article at EzineArticles
Republished here, here and here (to name a few).

5. Testimonials

Most merchants won’t publish a live outbound link to your site from their sales page, but if you get creative you might just be able to get a link from their blog or an internal page on their website pointing to your review or case study of their product.

I’m actually seeing an example of this in the SERPs now with a page I’m trying to beat out for their #3 listing. By analyzing their backlinks, I discovered the merchant was linking to their review.

Look for merchants that link out to reviews, give live links in testimonials, or that have blogs. If they have a blog you can offer a detailed case study or success story as a guest post, which includes the link to your review of their product.

6. DMOZ Directory

Meh. Good luck. But if you can manage to get a one way link by submitting and getting an approved listing in the DMOZ directory – go you!

Here’s the link: http://www.dmoz.org/help/submit.html

7. Social Bookmarking

Ideally you should include social bookmarking buttons on your blog posts or web pages to encourage your readers to bookmark your content. This is the best and most natural way to get one way links from this source.

You can also set up your own social bookmarking accounts, but my advice is that for every link of your own that you bookmark… you should bookmark 5 or 10 other links on domains or properties you do not own. This keeps it natural, and resourceful.

See: Top DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites by PageRank & Alexa Rank

Also download and read Social Media Daily by Michelle MacPhearson

8. Bonus One Way Link Building Tip!

This bonus tip is actually one of my favorite one way link building strategies. It’s so slick you’ll be shocked at how simple and effective it is. And it’s easy too – you don’t even have to request a single backlink for this one…

Write content so great that you get unsolicited one-way links to your page from all over the web. That’s it. This post serves as a good example.

Best,

Also See: How Many Backlinks Do I Need?

Your content may be a sales page, a product review, an article or tutorial with a strong call-to-action, or even a blog post or article that links to one of those pieces of content.

Regardless of what type of content it is, you need inbound links to market that content. Those links are a means of communicating with your target market, and an open door inviting them to view your content.

It’s too easy to get caught up in the mechanics of web content development and seo, and forget the true purpose – and the human element…

When we research keywords, we see search volume and profit potential. But behind those phrases are real people with real needs, typing those phrases into their favorite search engine. Someone’s mom, brother, or daughter. Maybe even yours.

Connecting with that image will help you frame your content, and your links in the best possible way. A way that answers their question, or offers them the solution they’re searching for. It will help you communicate with them more effectively.

Creating content isn’t a business. SEO isn’t marketing. These are simply tools to achieve your real objective: to reach and interact with your market on the internet.

Get your ideal visitor in mind. Are they a certain age? A specific gender? What do they need or want? What ways do they use to research and find that?

How can you best serve them?

Keeping these things in the forefront of your mind as you work on your business will bring you the success that you’re looking for.

It’s not about using all the right plugins, all the right link building strategies, or writing with an exact word count in mind. It’s not about on-page and off-page factors, or search algorithms. It’s about the people that surf and search.

Twitter is a good micro-example. You can set up auto-tweets to push your content out to Twitter, you can pull your tweets into web pages, you can automatically follow and unfollow people by the masses. There are all kinds of plugins and programs and tips and guides…

But unless you are out there actually having a two-way conversation with your target market (and their mother, and their friends), all that pushing and pulling is going to get you nowhere. Social properties aren’t just for inbound links, they’re an opportunity to interact with your ideal visitors and your potential buyers.

The same can be said for link building strategies. It doesn’t matter if you know the algorithms down to an exact science. If your links don’t ’speak’ to the reader in the right way, or if your content doesn’t open and close the conversation they are having in their mind, your conversion rate is going to tank.

Meet them where they are (find out where they are and place your links strategically). Engage them by addressing the thoughts and questions they already have (with well-written content that matches the intent of their search).

Lead them to a solution (with a strong call-to-action). Then keep that conversation going, even after the sale, by following up and continuing to address any ongoing needs they may have (via your customer list or autoresponder).

Your inbound links and your content aren’t just for search engines. Your customer isn’t just a sale. Put the human element into your marketing, and your link building strategies, to really make it work – both for you, and for them.

Best,

When it comes to your link building strategy, you want to focus on the quality of your backlinks over
just the quantity or number of links you can get.

The first thing we’ll look at is how to define quality and which types of links carry more weight than others (and why), and then we’ll look at ways you can easily get those quality inbound links pointing to your pages…

The Quality of a Link

In addition to the quality of each individual backlink, your links are graded as a whole. This is why effective link building requires a variety of link types, and sources for inbound links. You are building a network, a navigation system, and that network of links and connections will be judged- not just on a link by link basis.

Factors that go into scoring the quality of a backlink include:

• Anchor Text
  Your anchor text should define the page you’re linking to, and should be the same or relevant to the keyword phrases you used to optimize that page. Anchor text is simply the text that is hyperlinked to your URL.

• Relevance of Linked Pages
  Two pages that are linked together should be related, or relevant to each other. The goal is to interlink related content across the web, with purpose.

• Link Location
  Links within the content area of a page carry more weight than links in static areas such as the navigation, sidebar, footer, etc. A contextual link is the highest quality link placement you can get on a page.

• Number of Outbound Links
  The total number of links on the page affect how much weight, or link juice, each outgoing link will receive. A link on a page with fewer outbound links will carry more weight. It will result in a higher click-through rate (CTR) as well, since there are fewer choices for visitors to click.

• Their Inbound Links
  If the page link to you has a good number of high quality inbound links, this will give your link on their page more weight. Seek out quality web pages with solid link structure for link placement.

• Follow/NoFollow
  While I subscribe to the rule of thinking that you should obtain any quality link from a relevant source that has the potential to send targeted (human) traffic to your page… for the purpose of obtaining the highest quality inbound links, you’ll want to get a good number of links that do not have the NoFollow attribute.

• PageRank
  I put this at the bottom of the list intentionally. What most people know as PageRank is really only Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) and is not actual PageRank. That said, it’s common practice to use the toolbar to get inbound links from pages with “more green” or higher PageRank. A good rule of thumb is to avoid pages with a greyed out PageRank bar (which means the page has been penalized).

Considering every single one of these factors for every inbound link you are considering can be incredibly time consuming. It can also be very rewarding, in regards to search engine optimization.

You still need a variety of link types and link sources though. A good question to ask yourself, before placing or requesting a link, is: Does this link add value to the page? Real value. People value. If so, add link.

Patience & Aging

Link Building is not a one-day task. Even if you could get all of the inbound links you need in one sitting, they wouldn’t all count right away. It takes time for your links to be found and indexed, so a little patience is required in the overall process.

Link Building is a gradual and ongoing task. You want to build your backlinks over time, and the value of those links will grow over time as well. An “aged link”, or a link that has been there for awhile, carries more weight than a brand new link.

This appears natural to the search engines versus big shots of inbound links all at once, and then nothing new for months. Or 100 new inbound links this month, that disappear at the end of the month. Google knows the difference between a link that lasts a month or two (a purchased link) and a permanent, quality inbound link.

Regarding how long it can take for your inbound links to be found and indexed, or to show up in Yahoo’s backlinks, that depends on how frequently the page (where your link is) gets spidered or crawled by the major search engines.

Tip: You can tell how recently Google has visited and cached a web page by clicking the “Cached” link beside the listing in the Google search results.

How to Get Quality Inbound Links

Given all these details, you can boil your task down to getting inbound links within the content area of a related quality web page. Ideally without the NoFollow attribute, and using your Primary Keyword Phrase as the anchor text.

How’s that for simplifying it?

Some of the easiest ways to obtain these types of high quality links include: Guest Blogging, Article Marketing, Testimonials, Interviews and Cross Blog Conversations.

Another idea, a bit more difficult to achieve, is “Link Bait” – or having something so interesting that people share it, blog about it, and link to it around the web.

We’ll discuss each of these options in more detail, along with even more link building strategies and creative ideas for getting high quality backlinks, in upcoming posts in this series. Stay tuned!

Best,

p.s. If you subscribe below you’ll receive an email every Monday with the weekly archive from ClickNewz. You’ll also have the option to subscribe to daily updates, and receive notification about hot new topics as they are published:

To be clear, there is no such thing as a “dofollow link”. It’s simply a link that does not have the NoFollow attribute. For more on that, see the NoFollow Attribute section in the Link Building 101 post.

There are browser plugins that will tell you whether links are dofollow or nofollow, and there are also Do Follow Blog Directories that will give you a list of blogs that offer dofollow links in the comment section…

DoFollow Resources

• DoFollow WordPress Plugin (this is the plugin I use here at ClickNewz)
• Firefox Add-on: NoDoFollow highlights & color codes follow/nofollow links
• DoFollow Blogs Directory sorted by niche/category
• DoFollow Community digg-style social network for do-follow blogs

You can find more directories and lists of “dofollow blogs” by doing a search on Google: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=dofollow+blogs

But there’s one major problem with this as a link-building strategy…

Anchor Text & Comment Spam

The problem with using blog commenting as a link building strategy is that you have to use your keyword phrase in the Name field in order to get your preferred anchor text hyperlinked to your URL:

Bloggers don’t like this, and often they won’t approve your comment if you use a keyword phrase in the Name field. Some have statements to that effect printed on their blog, others simply trash the comments.

It’s a personal call, and each blogger handles it how they please. As for me, I tolerate to an extent… but only if the comment itself really contributes to the discussion. Otherwise it’s a quick delete – and annoying to boot.

So your first major hurdle is finding dofollow blogs in your niche, or relevant to the page you want to link. Second is getting keyword rich hyperlinks with your blog comments approved and displayed.

To be honest, it’s probably not the absolute best use of your time. Meaning, I wouldn’t make this your top link building strategy…

Pingbacks vs Blog Comments

A pingback occurs when one blog post links to another. This will happen whether you are linking to your own blog posts (internally), or linking to someone else’s blog post on a different domain. It’s a great way to interlink related content.

Internally, between your own blog posts, interlinking can help your readers find more information from you. They may be reading an older post and click through the pingback to read your newer, related content. Or they may be reading a new post and follow links that reference topics you’ve discussed in detail already.

A pingback usually looks very much like a blog comment:

As you can see, the pingback uses the Post Title of your blog post as the anchor text for the hyperlink. In this case “Link Building 101: What is a Backlink?” is the anchor text, linking back to my post with a bit of the post text as the “comment”.

Obviously if you are using keyword-rich Post Titles (and you should be!), this is a better way to get a keyword-rich link from a relevant blog post.

And not only does this give you the inbound link you were hoping for, but pingbacks also get a much higher click-through rate (CTR) than blog comments. Readers view pingbacks as add-ons to the discussion, connections to related conversations.

Think about it. Which one are you most likely to click on yourself?

Note: Not all blogs are set up to display pingbacks, and not all bloggers will approve pingbacks. Pingback spam is like comment spam – rampant. You’ll want to locate blogs that display quality pingbacks, and make sure your post is relevant to their post (ie quality content that contributes to the topic).

How To Create A Quality Pingback

First, you should have a collection of related blogs in your niche in your Feed Reader or bookmarks. While scanning through their blog posts, you want to look for two things: topics you’ve already blogged about, or new topics that interest you.

When you find a great blog post on a topic you have already blogged about, you can go back to your published post and edit it. Include a link to their blog post from yours, click “update post”, and this will initiate a pingback to their blog post.

You might add a short paragraph that says “also see XYZ by ABC on this topic for a detailed explanation of 123″ or something like that. The goal is that it makes sense within your post, to human readers, and that it interlinks the two related posts – from your blog to theirs, and theirs to yours.

When you find a new topic in your niche, and you have an opinion to add to that conversation, you can create a blog post in response – instead of leaving a comment.

This serves two purposes: it introduces the topic to your own readers, and opens it up for discussion at your blog – and it also creates a pingback, connecting the two blog posts on that topic.

I also seek out relevant blog posts to quote as sources within my own blog posts. Once I have a topic in mind, I search for blogs that display pingbacks that are on topic and worth quoting – to add weight to my own thoughts on the topic.

Here’s an example, from my blog post on Social Marketing Pitfalls:

As you can see, I quoted a blog post by Tim Bossie and linked to the source. This created a pingback on his blog post:

I know – it says Trackback instead of Pingback. I am still not quite sure what the difference is between the two. They seem to be very similar if not the same from where I’m sitting. Regardless, it happens by linking to one blog post… from another blog post. See Pingback and Trackback.

Also see: What’s A Pingback? And How To Write Links by Sue Waters.

The web is made up of conversations, micro-topics and links that connect them. If you’re not interlinking relevant content, you’re doing a disservice to your readers – and to the web as a whole.

The bottom line…

Blog commenting is good, but Pingbacks are better. Pingbacks take less of your time, and add quality content to your own blog at the same time.

Even better than both are links within the actual content area of a blog post. If you’re spending a lot of time on blog commenting for link building, your time could be better spent doing guest blogging and/or article marketing.

Not that blog comments and pingbacks aren’t good, because they are… but if you’re counting every minute while trying to grow your online business, do the things that count the most.

Stay tuned because we’re going to discuss quality of links next, and how to get the highest quality inbound links to your pages…

Best,

p.s. I mentioned that Pingbacks get a much higher click-through rate from blog comment sections. And they do. I take 5 minutes when writing a blog post to search out relevant posts to link to and add them in. It provides greater resources and depth for my readers, while also creating that pingback on the linked-to post.

Pingback Tip: If you are responding to another blog post, write your Post Title carefully. This is what will display as the anchor text in the pingback on their blog… and a compelling title can really increase your click-through rate!

But how many backlinks do you need?

The answer is: the number it takes to out-rank a competing page. If both pages are equally optimized for the same keyword phrase, and in most cases even if they’re not, it’s the number of backlinks that will determine who ranks highest for that search query. But not just the number of backlinks…

Why Some Sites Rank Higher Than Others… With Fewer Backlinks

Often, when analyzing backlinks, you’ll notice that a page with fewer links outranks a page that has more. The reason for this is in the quality of those links. Link Popularity is the number of inbound links, Link Reputation is the quality of those links. Quality is determined by a number of factors:

The type of link – article directory, social bookmark, etc. The variation in link types. The location of the link (content area vs footer, for example). The relevancy of the page linking to it, the anchor text used in the link, etc.

Another factor is the total number of unique domains linking to that page. Three links from one domain will not carry as much weight as three links from three different domains.

A little digging in the competing page’s list of backlinks can usually tell you exactly what it would take to outrank that page with your own. All you need is more total links, or higher quality links than theirs.

How To Analyze Backlinks

This method works well whether you want to analyze your own backlinks, or those of a web page you are competing with for placement in the search results.

Since inbound links (off-page optimization) carry so much weight in Google rankings, this is the one area you’ll do most of your competition analysis.

Here’s the quick & easy process I use to analyze backlinks:

• Search your chosen keyword phrase at Google.com.
• Click through the top results, and view the web page.
• Copy the URL of that page from the address bar.
• Go to Yahoo.com and use the search bar…
• Type in “link:” and then paste in the URL of the page.

example- link:http://www.clicknewz.com/1993/how-to-write-a-blog-post/

That will take you to Yahoo Site Explorer and will show you the total number of inbound links to that specific web page (URL). Once you’re there, you can use the drop-down box to select “except from this domain” to exclude all of that site’s internal links and see only the inbound links from other domains.

It’s easier than it sounds once I type it all out – give it a try and you’ll see it actually only takes a minute tops. A lot of people use fancy software programs, browser plugins or various other methods. I like to keep it simple.

Let’s walk through this together so you can see exactly how it’s done:

Tip: use the buttons in the lower right hand corner of the video to view it in HQ (high quality), or to view it in full screen mode.

What you’re looking for is the total number of backlinks to that page, and the total number of external backlinks (not including the site’s own internal linking). I tend to go for less competitive keyword phrases, and rule out competing with large numbers of backlinks and/or obvious authority sites.

That said, sometimes the number of backlinks alone can be deceiving so you may want to dig a little deeper. If they have a lot of backlinks and you really want to compete for their spot, then you can analyze the quality of those backlinks.

When analyzing a list of backlinks, count the actual number of unique domains linking to that page. If there are 5 links from one domain, count that as just one. You can also click through each link in the list, and look for the backlink.

See where it is placed on the page, as links within the content area carry more weight than links in static areas of the site: sidebar, footer, navigation, etc.

How relevant is the content to the page it’s linking to? Is it a pet site linking to a dog page (relevant), or a gardening blog leading to a dog page (not relevant)?

Also see if they are using your keyword phrase as the anchor text for that link.

The most important part of that research is to count the number of instances they use your keyword phrase in the anchor text. The total number of those links… will tell you how many links you need with that exact anchor text to out-rank the page.

While you’re analyzing the backlinks of competing web pages, you’ll often find great sources for inbound links for your own page. Look at who is linking to their page, and how, and make notes of places you can get your own link on that page – or on similar pages. Your competitors backlinks are a goldmine of link sources!

Watch the video, try it out, and see for yourself how simple this is

Best,

p.s. Next we’ll look at ways to get high quality inbound links, and exactly what types of links you’ll need for your pages to rank well in the major search engines.

Be sure to subscribe below for updates by email so you don’t miss a single tutorial in this in-depth Link Building series:

If you are getting backlinks for the purpose of higher rankings in the major search engines, then you need a variety of links from a variety of source types.

The goal is to get organic, natural backlinks. The kind that both visitors and search engines love most. The kind that happen naturally on their own, but that you must also push along a bit for proper content marketing…

A common mistake that bloggers and webmasters make when promoting their content is to stick to one type of link-building only. Some do mainly article marketing, others prefer social bookmarking, some blog commenting, etc.

But ideally you’ll want a variety of links, coming from a variety of source types – with variation in the anchor text of the links as well.

It’s unnatural, and therefore appears spammy, to get 100 new backlinks all from social bookmarking sites only, and all with the exact same anchor text. This is likely to send up a red flag, and do more harm than good to your seo strategy.

This is not effective link building. It’s similar to running for a political office, and visiting all of the voting booths yourself… to cast votes for yourself.

An effective link building campaign is one that appears more like a natural buzz. Google counts links to your site as ‘votes’ for your content, and they are most interested in what other sites/people have to say about it than what you say.

In order to create that natural appearance for your inbound links, you use variation. You’ll want to get links from blog posts, blog comments, social bookmarking sites, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, web pages, press releases (if appropriate), article directories, niche directories, discussion forums, etc.

You’ll want a variety of anchor text in those links as well. This is best achieved by using longtail keyword phrases, or by using more than one keyword phrase that is relevant to the content on that page.

The advantage to using variation in your anchor text is that not only do your links appear more natural, which means they’ll carry more weight with the major search engines, but you can achieve top rankings for more than one search phrase.

For example, I have one web page that ranks in the Top 3 for three different keyword phrases. I make sales from that page every single week (and some weeks, every day). This is due to using the three different phrases as the anchor text, and switching it up each time I get a new link to that page.

You can create an effective link building campaign by kick-starting the buzz, and with great content you’ll end up with many more natural backlinks in addition to those you create yourself.

This is not something you want to do for every single web page or blog post, but it’s well worth it for those pillar articles – or those pages/post you most want to rank well in the major search engines.

An effective link building strategy might include:

• Create internal links from related pages on your blog/site
• Tweet the link and ask for feedback
• Publish the link on your Facebook profile or page
• If a blog post, create pingbacks to related blog posts
• Comment on related blog posts, using your specific link in the URL field
• Published a related YouTube video, include the hyperlink in the description field
• Add the link to your niche discussion forum profiles
• Include the link in your forum signature on niche forums
• Submit relevant articles to article directories with the link in the byline
• Submit a press release (if appropriate for your content piece)
• Write guest blog posts on niche blogs, with the link in your signature
• Engage in Cross Blog Conversations with other bloggers on the topic
• Include the link with 5-10 other related links on a social bookmarking list
• If the link is to the main page, add it to niche directories
• If the link is to the main page of a blog, also add it to blog/RSS directories

If you have a really good piece of content, these strategies will kick-start a natural buzz and new unsolicited links from a variety of sources. People may find and like your content and then stumble, tweet, bookmark, or blog about your link. And that’s exactly what you want.

Sure, this is work – particularly in the beginning. But once you identify your best sources you’ll find that it becomes faster and easier with time. You’ll have a list of blogs in your RSS Reader, a list of niche forums you’re engaged with, etc. And you can also outsource the tasks once you get a working strategy in place.

The variation in anchor text and sources is incredibly important for effective link building. Never dismiss a linking opportunity due to PageRank, Nofollow attribute, lack of option to include anchor text, etc. You need these to offset your highly optimized links… to avoid the dreaded “over-optimization” (ie: search engine manipulation, spam).

Best,

Previous Posts in the Link Building Series:
Web Page Optimization
Link Building 101