I wrote this a year ago and never got around to posting it, and now that is is almost a year later and a lot of my friends and perspective clients are caring less about Digg and social media links and getting back to the O.G. way of ranking sites I figured might as well post it.

Via: flickr
Old School: Internal Links
It seems that Nov-Jan are always insane with people wanting to prepare their site to dominate for the next year. This year is crazier then ever, and as we are meeting with a lot of sites and perspective clients I have noticed that very few sites link internally like they should. I will guarantee you that if you have a site that is ranking in the top 50 or so, meaning it is somewhat established has some trust and authority, if you interlink correctly you will see a significant jump in your rankings. Here is a list of somethings you want to make sure you follow, plus some tips on how to get the most juice out of your web sites trust.

Basics:
- Make sure your important pages, ie service pages, category pages, converting pages, have links to them from within the copy of other pages on your site.

- Use text that is relevant before or after the link, as well as relevant anchor text to the page you are linking to.

- Work the most important pages into the copy of your homepage text.

- Block the less important pages from the engines spiders as to save the juice for your important pages, ie contact us, privacy policy, etc. Do this through Robot.txt or No Index No Follow Tags.

Squeeze the Juice, Pulp and Scrape the Rhine:
- Identify your key pages along with those pages top keywords, then do a site:domain.com search in Google followed by the “Keyword phrase.” I like to start specific and then work my way general so if I wanted to increase my rankings for the words, “Lung Cancer,” “Lung Cancer Treatments” and “Lung Cancer Studies” I would start with the longer terms and I would do the searches in quotes at first, then work my way out like this.

site:DOMAIN.com “Lung Cancer Studies”
site:DOMAIN.com Lung Cancer Studies
site:DOMAIN.com “Lung Cancer Treatment(s)”
site:DOMAIN.com Lung Cancer Treatment(s)
site:DOMAIN.com “Lung Cancer”
site:DOMAIN.com Lung Cancer
site:DOMAIN.com Lung

I would then note each of the pages and wherever the text I am searching is found I would anchor to my Lung Cancer page. On the last one where I searched for just Lung I would look at the authority of the page, and it it was a good one and it was relevant I would add in “cancer” or “Lung Cancer” to the text and then anchor it up.

- Sort your sites pages by authority you can use Yahoo’s site explorer they usually return results in order of authority or you can use Jim Boykins strongest subpage tool to identify your best pages. Then see if you can work your desired keywords into the text and then link them up.

- Obviously Wikipedia ranks for everything first and foremost because it has insane amounts of links and authority. But have you ever notice the Internal Linking that goes on, every time a topic is mentioned that has a page dedicated to that topic there is a link. That is why pages that have nothing but internal links still rank number 2 for a huge word, because the anchor text, surrounding text that is pointing to those pages is all spot on.

- You will notice this on top blogs that understand this as well, look at Tech Crunch and Mashable they rank for everything even though they are kicking out 15 Posts a day. Again they have a lot of outbound trust, but they also set up a company index and every time that company is mentioned in their posts they link to the company index tab. Their posts are speckled with internal links. If you have a blog you can do the same thing. Every time you mention a keyword related to one of your pages[seo blog], link back to it.

We always start with internal linking when taking on a new client, and it has never let us down. People think you are magic cause you moved up their rankings 15 spots in 5 days, but all you did is internal links. (But hey they didn’t do them before, so you are magic right?) I recommend relying very heavily on Internal Links.

I did a webinar on the above topic with Omniture earlier this year.

via flickr
New School: Inbound Contextual Links*Not really new school anymore
To get the most authority to your site and to make those internal links really count you need inbound links from related sites. To get those top 3 and number one rankings you need one way inbound links from inside copy. You want text all around that bad boy on a page that is on topic with your page.

Link building is nothing new, I am not going to layout some of the basics, there are plenty of blogs discussing the ins and outs of links. I want to talk about a little tactic that has been working really well for us on finding some top notch under the radar links.

I am sure you already use the allintext: allin etc. advanced commands when searching for related links, we used to use it all the time. What we have been doing this last year is the same idea just at http://blogsearch.google.com.

Go there and search allintext:”Keyword Phrase” this will bring back all the blog posts in Google’s database that have your keyword phrase in their text or blog post. You can use other advanced operatives or the keyword phrase by itself or in quotes.

We like this because bloggers are more likely to respond to you then old school site owners, they are wanting to be approached and they are usually on their blog/email all day. Also a lot of bloggers aren’t familiar with seo, they don’t know that someone may want to email them and hit them up for a link and offer them $50. A lot of times we offer some dough and they come back ans say thanks for liking and commenting on my blog, I added the link for free.

That is the other thing we like, blog posts are better with a lot of resources and info linked to and cited. So if you have a good relevant site for one of their blog posts, they are more than likely cool on adding the link.

This really only goes wrong if you send over a demanding or not so well written email begging for the link. Test this don’t send out 50 your first day with the same copy pasted in over and over. Send out 5 in the morning, 5 more in the afternoon and 5 more at night all with different messages. Start out by making everyone totally organic and unique commenting on the blogs. After you have done it a while you can see what is working and what is not. Maybe it’s not your message but your Subject and email look spammy so they never open it? Tweak all the aspects of it. Also pay attention to the emails you get where people hit you up for links and others. If you are not tricked into opening it, then it isn’t good, the very few that you do open, note them.

Any email that gets accepted or even opened take note of it and apply it to later messages. You will also want to try the good old phone as that is still very effective in this because of how quickly it can be done and how forth coming it is.

*Also added in 2008 use Yahoo Site Explorer and or SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool to quickly check the value of the link.

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I am going to give a full recap on SMX in the next couple of days, but I wanted to share something really quick that Todd Friesen (Director of SEO for Range Online) said in a “Better Ways” conference session (referring to link building) that he buys links. There you have it. A featured speaker at SMX and “SEO Guru” telling all of us to “buy links”. (He did freak out and wonder if Matt was it the room because he knew all of his clients, and that was funny)

Please don’t get me wrong, he did not say just go and buy every link you can get your hands on, but the words about buying links did come out of his mouth. Keep it relevant, and find links that would bring in targeted customers (if they clicked). As far as I am concerned - discussion over, go and buy some relevant links!

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Just wanted to let everyone know I finally got around to cleaning a little house with the Internet Business Directory over on Eplanit.biz (the other part of this website). Probably in a month or so there will be a completly new directory with sub-cats and all. For now its going to have to stay how it is. (I am way to busy to do it any other way) I am the only editor on this directory.

There are several categories where there is not much in the way of listings, but the pages still carry good PR. Most anywhere you want to list in the directory has well under 50-100 links, with several 15 and under. I had to offer all the text links inside the directory as paid to get rid of all of the crap that people were trying to submit to me. This directory gets a decent amount of traffic and would be worth listing for that fact alone besides what it could do to help improve search engine rankings.

I look over each listing submitted and do my best to not let any garbage in. So this is still very much a human edited directory. We offer a 29.95 premium submission service that gets you 6 quality text links (yes you can deep link; ie - subpages) and we have a budget listing at 9.95 that gets you one anchor text link with a URL link as well. Most of the time if I like the site I will throw in an extra link or two, but you really do get a lot more for the money with our premium submission service.

I know this directory is not the top of the line ones out there that are all automated and crap, but I wanted to try and keep as much of the human touch to this one as I possibly could!

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On the official Google Blog tonight Vanessa Fox dishes out some cool new updates about the anchor text inside your Google Site Maps account. You can click on the link to check out her full post, but here are some things I am excited to see:

• They are showing 200 phrases now
• You can see all kinds of variations for your anchor text
• Most common individual words in anchor text
• You can view more of your common words

Check this image out as a sample of the extent of the cool information we are getting now:Â (this is the external links varied use etc)

This information is amazing because it shows us flat out how others are seeing our site, as well as see exactly how other sites are linking to us. We can learn from it and grow our websites. Any other cool uses that anyone has found with this new feature?

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Here is the question in full:

I have 50 articles written and ready to submit. I ran across the following suggestion to submit articles but I wasn’t sure it was ok to do. Can i submit the same article to multiple directories? What are your thoughts? (more…)

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I have been getting notified by the MS Small Business Directory (Submit It) about changes to all my directory listings and submit it program about to happen. I am actually excited about this for a few reasons. The submit it tools they offered were crap anyway, and the only thing I ever used the service for was the directory submission. When they no longer accepted new directory submissions a few months back it really bummed me out because it was one of the (few) good things that Microsoft had left.

It looks like they are bringing it back: (more…)

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I ran this promotion I got from Text Link Ads a while back and it went really well for those that used it, so I wanted to share it again with my readers. If you have been thinking about testing the waters on a text link program to help increase your rankings then I recommend Text Link Ads. In my opinion there is no other! They even are gonna give you a free $100 if you give them a shot:

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This Google Sitemaps Greasemonkey script is one of the coolest scripts I have seen in a long time. It is for your Google Sitmaps account and specifically your link reporting section. It displays Google Page Rank, Anchor Text, if the link isn’t found and Nofollow for all the links shown in your sitemap report.

Here is a screen shot from some of my links to 97th Floor

You will see a normal link is in Black with the PR and the Anchor Text.

Red is link is not found but it still shows pr so you can keep of track of those you may want to go back and get again.

Yellow has the same data as black but in Yellow with a strikethrough that is for the No Follow, what was cool is by doing this I found 2 blogs that have really high pr that are not adding no follow to their links. I rarely check blogs for that anymore as most are no following by default.

You need the Firefox greasemonkey addon to use it. Once you have it, go to the link above and click on install and it automatically adds it to your account. Login to Sitemaps and you have all the data instantly.

If they could make this work for Yahoo SiteExplorer I would be stoked as Google Sitemaps is still off on my links by a couple thousand and It would be nice to have a quick and dirty app for analyzing bl’s of competitors from anywhere, instead of always using my internal tools.

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SEO Question:

I wanted to know if there is a quota for getting inbound links on a weekly or monthly basis? (more…)

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Lloyd: What the hell are we doing here, Harry? We gotta get out of this town!
Harry: Oh yeah, and go where? Where are we gonna go?
Lloyd: I’ll tell you where. Someplace warm. A place where the beer flows like wine. Where beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. I’m talking about a little place called Aspen.
Harry: Oh, I don’t know, Lloyd. The French are a$#holes

Some of the best discoveries are found on accident. This last week I have been testing a tool for a totally different reason than what it was created and it is looking like a sweet way to let relevant pages prime and ready for links “flock” straight to your RSS Reader. (more…)

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