If your blog isn’t linkworthy, it’s not going to get very far in the blogosphere. Indeed, links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. No links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.
One might even go so far as to valuate a business blog on its links (at least in part). For fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, this blog is worth $200,000. Anyone want to buy it from Rick? 
So how do you make linkworthy posts? In The Art of Linkbaiting, Nick Wilson and commenters offer some great suggestions:
- Offer a niche-specific blogroll, tool, How-To, or compilation of news stories.
- Post a scoop.
- Expose a story as flawed or a fraud
- Be a contrarian about a story, product, or prominent blogger’s opinion.
- Be humorous. Good topics include a bizzare pic of your subject, “10 things I hate about…”, and “You know you’re a when…”
- Publish or commission some original research
- Creative-Commons-license photos you made of an event you’re blogging about
- Make available for free a theme, plugin or piece of software
- Start a meme that others can replicate and that links back to you (e.g. buttons/stickers/tools for bloggers/webmasters to post on their sites, contests, quizzes, surveys, etc.)
Building links is both art and science. It requires a great toolkit as well as loads of creative ideas.
MarketingProfs is holding a webinar on Feb. 16 on the topic: “Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization”. The undisputed link guru Eric Ward and I (Stephan Spencer) are both presenting. Sign up here.
Filed under: Blogs Business Blogging Link Building
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Netconcepts President Stephan Spencer has some key advice for Technorati to counteract the challenge from its new blog search engine rival: Google.
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HomeVisions is a brand of DMSI (Direct Marketing Services Inc.). If you are not familiar with HomeVisions, you might be familiar with some of DMSI’s other brands, including Montgomery Wards.
DesignTalk is a retail blog that strives to educate and add value on the topic of interior design and home decor. The blog is chock full of creative ideas and tips for home decorating organized in many ways, including by room and by application. The blog encourages you to ask a question which could be answered as a blog post, as well as posting a comment. The blog includes a newsletter and, of course, an RSS feed.
[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]
Visit The Site: DesignTalk
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This screencast, presented by Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer, explains how to install and use the free Firefox extension SEO-Links to gauge the succesfulness of text link advertisers.
First Stephan installs the extension. Then he jumps to the Seacoastonline.com home page, which is selling links over in the right column half-way down the page. By simply hovering the cursor over each of the text link ads, he obtains backlink counts for each advertiser and their rankings across Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search for the phrase in the anchor text. This provides an indication as to how effective that advertiser is at SEO. The assumption is that an SEO-savvy and successful text link advertiser will make better advertising decisions than an unsuccessful one. If a bunch of successful ones flock to a particular site selling text link ads, then that’s an indication that the site is a good one to advertise on (assuming other things check out like the advertisers aren’t using spam tactics).
Turns out the site is not a good site for link advertisers. Find out why by downloading the 4 minute video as either a 2 megabyte WMV file or a 5 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)
Filed under: Link Building Screencasts SEO
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I heard at the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month in Chicago that the Ask Jeeves spider doesn’t cope well with websites that don’t have robots.txt. So if you don’t have a robots.txt file hosted on your blog’s document root, create a blank one.
Another detail often missed by bloggers is to create your own custom favicon.ico file. The favicon is a little 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in the location bar on people’s web browsers; many of the RSS readers use it as well. Peter Brady at Performancing has some interesting things to say about whether or not bloggers need to have a favicon. My take on it is this: with a custom favicon, you look cooler and more with it, plus it differentiates you from the rest of the pack in your subscribers’ RSS subscription lists. If you don’t have time to mess around creating one in Photoshop, you can do a quick and dirty one pretty easily using the free web-based tool Favicon Generator. It took me all of two minutes to create my favicon for my blog using this tool.
Filed under: Blogs Business Blogging Tools
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Search Engine Strategies — Chicago, IL
This session explores how search engines are dealing with blog and feed (RSS/Atom) content and why providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
Speakers:
Dick Costolo, CEO, FeedBurner
Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit
Filed under: Business Blogging RSS Marketing Seminars SEO
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Blogs and RSS feeds may sound like a lot of nerdy buzzwords, but President of Netconcepts Stephan Spencer wades in with his thoughts for webpronews.com, particularly when it comes to driving search engines to one’s site. It’s all about personalizing the content they receive he says.
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University of Wisconsin Executive Education - Integrated Customer Communications — Madison, WI
Technology continues to revolutionize the sales and marketing efforts of firms worldwide. Businesses must either adapt or put themselves at risk. Companies and customers communicate and interact with each other in substantially different ways than 10 or even 5 years ago. Direct and interactive marketing are converging, financial metrics are increasingly mainstream, and customers expect channel “silos” to be broken down. Learn how to benefit from the new tools and thinking in managing customer relations to increase sales, improve strategies, and reach online and offline markets.
Search engine marketing
- Make your site “search engine friendly”
- Explore “Pay-per-click” search advertising
- Analyze benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI
- Identify trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising
Create a buzz - viral marketing
- Explore blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
- Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
- Discover the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message
Filed under: Business Blogging RSS Marketing Seminars Web Marketing
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MarketingProfs virtual seminar series — online (webcast)
Links are the currency of the search engines. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts will be in vain.
Link building is arguably the most difficult, most misunderstood, and most poorly executed aspect to SEO. Join SEO and link-building expert Stephan Spencer as he guides us through the quagmire and shows us the way to great search engine rankings.
You will learn:
- Google’s PageRank scores: red herring or useful metric?
- What makes a link valuable or not
- Creative strategies for building link-worthy content
- What works when approaching webmasters with link requests
- Pitfalls to avoid if buying or bartering links
- The phenomenon of Google bombing and making it work in your favor
- The role of authorities, hubs, and topical relevance
- How to leverage blogs and the blogosphere for link building
- To get your content successfully syndicated onto other web sites with RSS
- How to capture the link gain (PageRank) of your affiliates and your advertising
The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.
Filed under: Link Building Seminars SEO Webinars
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