Tricky But White Hat Link Building Technique

Disclaimer:  This can be massively abused.  Please note that I am not at all condoning the use of this tactic to spam blogs!

Finding CommentLuv blogs to comment on

This is pretty obvious once you soak it in, so there isn’t much detail to this tip.  CommentLuv is a Wordpress plugin that allows your blog to search for your commentators’ last blog post.  (if they have a blog and they put their blog address in the URL field when making a comment on your blog)

CommentLuv will go to their site, check to see if its a blog, check to see their last post, grab the link and the title of that post, and come back to YOUR blog and put the title of their last post which is also linked.

You can go through some of my older posts and see it in action or check out my post on the CommentLuv plugin to see how it works.

CommentLUV links are pretty valuable, even if they are no-follow links.

I have noticed a significant increase in the number of clicks from blog comments I’ve made on sites using CommentLuv.  Obviously, people are given a convenient link to click on with the title of my last post which sells the click well if I’ve made a good headline (title) for the post.

Given that fact, I have done searches in my niche to find out which of my fellow internet marketing bloggers are using CommentLuv.

Here’s how to Google and find all the CommentLuvers in your niche:

keyword “Enable CommentLuv which will”

Put your umbrella keyword for your niche in the keyword area.  It can be a phrase like “blog marketing” or just one keyword like “marketing.”

You will turn up dozens if not hundreds of blogs using this plugin and talking about your topic.

Now you can go get into the discussion on these blogs (making REAL and VALUABLE comments!) and also pick up that extra link CommentLuv puts on the bottom of your comments.

Food for Thought:  What other popular Wordpress plugins can you think of that work like CommentLuv to do similar searches?

Example:  If there were a popular plugin a lot of bloggers use to reward their most active commentators with a link in their sidebar, (Top 5 Most Active Members, e.g.) you can isolate text from that plugin that is pretty unique, put it in quotes with your keyword as above, and find every blog using that plugin so you can become active on those sites.

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Tags: commentluv, finding commentluv users, Link Building

Good social marketing resources on Traffickd

Giant List of Social Media Sites of All Kinds

Social Media Website Directory on Traffikd - this is a good, large list of social sites. You might discover some gems you haven’t heard of here.

On the Traffikd Blog

How To Target Social Media With Specific Posts - targeting certain social media with your posts and coming up with linkbait that works in social media.  Great, detailed post on the subject.

Tags: Link Building, linkbait, social marketing, social media sites

The History and Purpose of Getting Trackbacks

Before people ever discovered that something like trackbacks might be valuable for SEO purposes, there was the original purpose.Understanding why trackbacks were created in the first place will help in the ongoing web-wide discussion about follow vs. no-follow and the debate over whether a link is worth getting if Google doesn’t give you any credit for it.

What Are Trackbacks and Why Do They Exist?

Trackbacks were created by blog software programmers to help bloggers easily link to each other and get credit for doing so with automation. Rather than writing about someone else’s blog post on your site and then writing to them to let them know you just linked to their post and asking for the possibility of them linking back to you, trackbacks automate the process.

Don’t know what a trackback is? Check out my video on how to do a trackback. And see TrackBoost.

Before people realized that trackbacks could be used for SEO, bloggers used them for the direct traffic trackback links would send them from the blogs they comment on. Not in the comments area on that blogger’s site, but remotely.

Trackbacks are sort of like “remote comments” in that, the blog you are linking to gets notified automatically that you’ve linked to a particular post and the blogger gets the same email they would had you commented directly on their blog that a comment is awaiting moderation.

They check it out and see that you’ve done a trackback.

They come to your post through the link and see that you’ve been flattering them by linking directly to their latest post in your post and explaining why you liked their post.

They go back to their moderation area and approve your trackback and it shows up in the comments area with all the other comments on that particular post you linked to.

Other readers get into the discussion on that blog, see your trackback and click the link to see what you had to say about this post. Not all, but some will do this.

That was, and still should be, the #1 reason to do a trackback above all else.

I have said thousands of times in hundreds of trainings, all my reports and books on the subject of linking, and on this blog that links are for TRAFFIC first and that any SEO benefit you might get from them is a supplemental bonus to a well rounded linking campaign. NOT the entire goal of one.

If you visit someone’s blog and they seem overly concerned about doing trackbacks only on blogs that have no-follow turned off, take that as a hint that they might not know much of what they are talking about, or at least, they have an unnatural obsession with search engines that makes their marketing campaign unhealthy and less productive for their business.

People who only look for links on sites with “follow” links are missing the point in spades. I mean they are really, seriously under a severe misconception about what linking is for.

I don’t pay any attention whatsoever to no follow and I don’t spend all day looking at peoples’ source code to detect it. It is a complete and utter waste of time to do so. This site and my traffic is proof of that.

I get links and give links based on content that will help my readers and from places where my target reader surfs. Period. End of story. Follow or no follow, it truly doesn’t matter.

The moment I stopped paying attention to every little thing Google does to rank sites, the better my site started ranking.

The things I pay attention to where SEO is concerned are simply:

1. Serving my visitors relevant, high quality content as much as possible. This makes my average pageviews go up and Google doesn’t like high bounce rates. They like to see long visits and multi-page visits to determine the value of your site to visitors.

2. I write sensible but optimized titles for my posts. If you want to score for a keyword, it had better be in the title of your post and early in the content of that post. Here you can get into serious debate over keyword density and all kinds of other things, but following this basic rule will get you far down the road before you have to worry about density. I don’t calculation density because I am writing for my readers. If the keyword gets used the “proper” amount of times it is only because it was necessary to tell the story.

3. Getting links. I get all kinds and from whatever places have resonant content to mine or surfers that are the perfect target for my content, products and services. Many are links that Google follows. Many are certainly not. I can’t be sure the exact number because I don’t care. I get links. Period. I get links because of the real or potential direct traffic they provide. Any search engine justice I get from any links I pick up is merely a symptom of a good marketing campaign. Not the entire focus.

Trackbacks Are For Traffic!

Don’t allow yourself to get caught up in the debate over follow vs. no follow. It serves no purpose but to sap your time and energy. If you land on a blog that clearly has good readership and traffic and you want to do a post pointing your visitors to a great post on that blog, but you find that the blogger uses no follow, DO IT ANYWAY!

Are you going to miss out on all the potential traffic that blogger can send you just because Google won’t give you credit for the link? I certainly hope not! But thousands of people are hung up on that fact and are missing the forest for the trees!

I see people doing trackbacks to bloggers with do follow but no traffic! They actually think that’s better than doing a trackback on a blog with no follow but a ton of readers.

Listen, Google ALSO pays attention to how popular a site is in real visitors. If you are linked from a site that is do follow that gets no traffic and never gets popular, how much is that going to be worth to you in pagerank and link juice anyway?

Forget the fact that everyone should have do follow. That cat is out of the bag and the people who chose to go the no follow route, as ridiculous as it is, have made a choice that you cannot change.

Just Get Links!

Get them from social sites (many of which Google doesn’t follow links from even if the site itself is do follow!). Get them from high, medium, and low traffic sites. Get them from anywhere and everywhere your target market surfs.

Stay away from bad neighborhoods. Check out who you are linking TO and where you are getting links FROM. Don’t be a link whore. Just be natural in the way you pick where you get link love and keep it relevant so that the traffic you get is targeted to your content and products.

Everything else works itself out just fine, trust me. This is how I do it and it’s obviously working out well for me.

Tags: getting links, getting trackbacks, how to do a trackback, Link Building

Link Building Today

Wandering around the SEO stomping grounds today I found some good link building articles. Check these out for some new ideas on getting links to your site in creative ways.

Recent Link Building Blog Posts

Comment on Blog For A Cause Or Fabricate A Story by Link Building …

[…] Read more Blog For A Cause Or Fabricate A Story | Andy Beard - Niche Marketing […]

Tips on Content Centered Link Building

that reminds me of the interplay between content and link building. “If you don’t create useful content, you won’t attract any links. How can you attract links if you don’t have content worth linking to?”. …

Creating a Link Building Machine

Intelligent online publishers have been creating Link Building Machines for years but others try to rely on short term fixes. The short term fix (as you might have guessed) isn’ta good long term business strategy. …

Internal Linking & Site Depth

Many people make a common mistake, which is not getting links to pages other than their homepage. Many times you’ll see pages with 98% of all their links going to their index page. This isn’t the best practice, it is best to deep link. …

9 Critical Steps to Evaluating Incoming Link Quality — By Stephen …

After all, getting links from authoritative sites is valuable even if you do have to share the link-juice. Just be aware that the fewer the outgoing links on a page, the more link-equity (PageRank) is being passed along to you. …

Getting Links From .Edu Web Sites

Getting links from high traffic web sites is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your web site. Some of the most trafficked sites on the Net include .edu and .gov sites because they contain lots of content focused on a particular …

Tags: getting links, link bait, Link Building, seo

Tipzu - Full blown HTML enabled content network

Want to get in early on a new site? The creator of Tipzu is asking for beta testers for a new Web 2.0 property.

What’s Cool About Tipzu?

The thing I like the most about it is it is unrestricted. You can link out in any way you want from the content you publish there. It accepts articles with full HTML control and has a ton of other great features like:

• Publishing Multiple Articles
• Full HTML control
• Revenue Sharing
• Add Video’s, Opt-In Forms
• Build Multiple Landing Pages
• Blog Platform
• RSS
• Title Tag Control
• Comments
• Build A User Base Community
• Newsletter with RSS

It’s Squidoo, Hubpages + Blogspot in one…

It is worth a hard look. This is going to help a lot of publishers with SEO and the network will attract a good deal of traffic as word grows and it comes out of beta.

To check it out and become a beta tester, head over to Jon’s welcome video which shows you all the features and gives FTR readers a “back door” into the site.

Tags: beta testers, Content Syndication, getting links, Link Building, seo, tipzu, web 2.0 marketing

Simple Trick For Building Your Social Network’s Authority

I just wrote up a link building tip in Social Marketing Central, the Friday Traffic Report’s community, that you should check out if you want a cool way to help your satellite pages do better in the engines.

Hint:  90% of the people who comment here at FTR are doing it wrong!  I show you why in my latest blog post at Social Marketing Central.

Read: Simple trick for getting link juice to your satellite pages

Tags: Link Building, link juice, satellite pages, social marketing, Social Marketing Central

Building True Social Authority

Below is what social authority begins to look like after you’ve mastered the art of social marketing. The list includes all my main profiles on social communities, social news sites, marketing groups, and remote blogs and pages. They are the sites I visit most frequently and get the most out of as far as traffic, links, and branding.

Note what Darren Rowse outlined in his video about keeping a consistent profile across all your sites as much as possible. Clicking through the sites below you’ll see that I’ve tried to do just that over time and it really helps with branding.

Social Power Linking is about showing up everywhere your target market surfs. This list isn’t complete. I just got tired of building it and stopped at what I thought were the main sites in my arsenal. I consider the value of belonging to the site (traffic it generates, link love it sends, and the value of the networks of contacts generated).

Digg - Pownce - Tumblr - Squidoo - LinkedIn - HubPages - YouTube - Twitter - WetPaint - SpongeFish

Tipzu - My 9rules - Revver - Mashable - Ojeez - Social Marketing Central - Blog Marketing Search

Delicious - PlugIM - Sphinn - MySpace - Facebook - Propeller - StumbleUpon - MyBlogLog - Blog Catalog

SelfGrowth Network - FriendFee - Fave - Entrecard - Windows Live Spaces

Add to the main sites above all the 2nd tier sites you inevitably join to test them out and check out the community “liveliness,” and the list quadruples in size.

Now, looking at the sample sites above, is it hard to imagine why social marketing works as well as it does? Everything we do in life, if it is worth doing at all, is a lot of work. Social marketing is no exception.

But while most of my competitors are doing traditional SEO, JVs, list mailing, and basically the same as everyone else in my niche, I am out there grabbing fresh prospects who are not on anyone’s list in my niche.

The “Born On Date” of the list members of many experts in my niche indicates a large number of people on all these lists have “expired.” You will find a good percentage of the most jaded, tight fisted prospects on great big lists whose owners have not been adding fresh prospects. Rather, they trade jaded, non-viable list members, clients, and customers back and forth depending on who is launching what at the time.

Freshening the customer base in my niche is where the money is.

People who haven’t been scammed or become jaded are far more receptive to good quality offers and tips than people the big gurus keep trading back and forth as they mail for each other.

Therefore I don’t need to have a list of 1 million people just to get by. The list of devoted, regular readers you create by authority blogging converts better, far better, than traditionally generated readerships and lists.

Consider that as you decide who to listen to when it comes to marketing online.

Every niche has this problem to a lesser degree. But none beats the IM niche for stale lists. It’s because everyone does joint ventures and simply “swaps spit” without bringing in significant new, fresh faces. Social marketing allows me to reach out and capture high quality prospects who surf the social scene and who have never heard of any of the gurus of internet marketing. (If you wanted to know one of my secrets - there it is!)

So, social marketing in any niche will also produce very fresh faces to inform and then sell to while increasing your search engine rankings, link popularity, branding, and overall niche authority. This is because most people do it wrong who are trying it without professional guidance.

Man cannot exist on “free blog tips” alone where social marketing is concerned!

Social Power Linkers “get it” and they are doing really well with social marketing compared to the results they were getting before learning Social Power Linking.

Tags: getting links, Link Building, social authority, social marketing, social media marketing, social power linking

Stephen Pierce Uncovers Traffic and Link Building Tactic on YouTube

Link Building with YouTube

I hate it when someone figures out something I should have figured out! The fact that it’s Stephen Pierce helps a little. But I’m still mad.

There’s a simple little trick Stephen teaches on today’s DTAlpha Blog which makes it easy to find high traffic sites to get links and traffic from. Stephen shows you how in his podcast “YouTube’s Amazing Overlooked Traffic Secret” REVEALED!” -Podcast, 10 min

Here are a couple more recent posts I found related to YouTube and video marketing:

YouTube - Marketing in the Age of Now and WOW!

YouTube Marketing - Guerrilla tactics and link bait for YouTubes …

Tags: Blog Marketing, Link Building, stephen pierce, video markeing, youtube promotion

Getting Links: Here’s how the Pros do it…

I found some great resources for getting more links in my travels through social space today and I thought I’d better share them with you.

17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You: One of the best ways to get links and generate buzz is to get bloggers to write about what you’re doing. Boing Boing co-author Cory Doctorow provides some tips on making it easy for bloggers to point to you.

10 Good Links You Can Get in the Next 50 Minutes: This week we thought we’d give you ten quick ways to get some links so that you can take a breather from the strenuous stuff and still feel good about adding real link value to your site.

Matt Cutts on Getting Links: Okay, here are some ways to get high-quality links without emailing, paying, or even paying attention to search engines. (Note: This was written in 2005 and is still a quality source of link-getting!)

When I wrote Power Linking first edition in 2002, I said that the most important factor for marketing online was, is, and always will be getting links. Since then the tactics have changed and trends have come and gone, yet links still remain the fabric (or the threads) of the web.

I am confident that I will be able to write the same thing in 2010 and 2025.

Tags: getting links, Link Building, link building tips, matt cutts

Michelle MacPhearson’s 30 Minute Backlinks

Michelle has released a new case study showing the effectiveness of her new 30 Minute Backlinks system. She got a static page on a brand new domain to #5 in Google in around 3 days.

We sometimes do that in minutes with blogs, but the telling part about the effectiveness of her method is that she did it on a static page on a brand new domain. Basically she came from out of nowhere and went to #5 in Google for her top term.

Suggest you go take a look at her video…

Check out 30 Minute Backlinks!

Tags: 30 minute backlinks, Link Building, Michelle MacPhearson

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