I thought i’d write about this for several reasons. First off,
when examining your competition with a tool like linkdiagnosis
or similar, it’s important to realize what links can push insane
value, which ones are mediocre and which ones are completely
flat and worthless.

Step back, why would you examine your competitors links thru
linkdiagnosis.com or similar? Links are 50% or more of the
Google & Yahoo ranking algorithms and help the engines decide
how popular your website is. It’s thru duplicating your
competitors links that you start to borrow some of the success
they already have with their sites.

Qualities of a good SEO Link

What site is the link on?

The website the link is posted on should be relavent to your
niche in some way. Maybe they supply materials, they’re also
in your industry or something.

It’s also nice to get some .Gov & .Edu links and even some
.ORG links (the domain of the linking site) pointing to yours.
(i’ll be describing that soon in the new book "linkbuilding 2009)

Other very important factors to consider are the age of the site
you got the link from, and the amount of popularity it holds.
Obviously a more popular and older site is more valuable than
a younger less popular site.

Where is the link?

A link from CNN.com isn’t good enough if they link to you
somewhere far in the nether regions where no one will see it.
But it’s good for rankings, right? Not neccesarily. The better
links are found in content and editorial links found dead
center of the website where the articles themselves reside.

The second best are those in the navigational menus on the
top and right hand side. The ones at the bottom carry less
weight. It makes sense, I mean if i shove a link down there
I bet 90% of the time it’s to forget about it or I was obligated
to put it there somehow, it’s not as important as the centre
stage stuff.

The anatomy of the link itself

The next thing to consider is the text of the link itself and how
it looks. A link that goes to your website with a keyword like
furnace installation is much better than one that just goes
straight to your name.. BUT.. it’s better to have variety and
some http://www.mywebsite.com links and some "My Keyword "
links to even things out.

Some places you submit to will let you control the text on
the link. Directories let you choose a title that often becomes
the blue clickable text, some forums & online sites actually
let you use an HTML description which allows you to create:

<A HREF="http://www.yourwebsite.com">My keyword</A>

Fast links can hurt, sometimes…

It’s my experience that only some types of links are penalized
for being built too fast, and some may argue that with me but
I suppose i could easily pull tons of case study examples to
show otherwise.

An example… If you send out a press release, can you control
That all of the sudden 200 people copy that release and
re-distribute it all over the web with your link in it? Obviously
not! However, 50 directory submissions in one day? Yeah, that’s
obviously not realistic.

Some obvious natural link builders:
* Social bookmarks
* Site shares (digg, stumbleupon)
* Press releases
* Bloggers

Some obviously submitted by you links:
* Blog Comments
* Article submissions
* Directory Submissions
* Forum signups

Until next time
Daniel J Deyette
LinkBuilding Service

Then I realized,

Why not submit myself to a blog directory? Is there such a thing?

OF COURSE there is! Your competition are probably already listed
in such directories, where are you?

Where do we find these, how much and which ones do I invest my

precious time on?

I did a quick Google and instantly found "Blog Catalog" which only required a little link in my sidebar.
Cool, I can handle that. Then I started digging, some wanted money, others reciprocal links and so on.

Now, being in the business as long as I have been, I know a recip bleeds my PR. Unless they’re a site I trust, I’m not linking back to them (unless i don’t care about the site i’m building or it’s just a spam page).

But paying a few bucks to be listed places isn’t a bad deal, and of course there’s nothing wrong with the free ones either…

Here’s a short list of blog directories. You might as well get the benefit of my hard work.<GRIN>

GO sign your blog up to some directories & Get some free press.

COME ON NOW!!

Sincerely,
Daniel J Deyette

I have an inside advantage to Google that most people I know simply don’t.

No, it’s not a girlfriend that works there.
No, I haven’t got Matt Cutt’s cell phone number.
No, I haven’t hacked into their systems either…

No, what I’m talking about is experience. For the last 7 years, I’ve watched
the search giant value pages in different ways. For those who still don’t understand
search engines, you’re doing yourself a major dis-service. Mind you, there
isn’t anyone out there explaining it very simply either. It’s all pretty technical.

SEO History for Non-Technical Folks…

(1995) In the begining, there was words. Websites had words, people searched
for words… But search engines didn’t exist. Directories like Yahoo did.
You searched for Plumbing, and guess what? AAAA1 Plumbing was #1.

(1996) Then Came Search engines, The more times you mentioned the words
(Keyword Density) The more "on topic" your site was.

That seemed to work quite well until folks started making websites that said
the word "cheese" 5,000 times at the bottom of each page. Yay, we’re #1
for cheese in Yahoo! How Cheesy is that?

(1998) Google Arrives…

Directories (Are ya in the internet phone book at least?)
Links pointing to the site (Do other people like your site enough to talk about it?)
* Age – Ah yes, and some experience would be good!

Google’s original theory was that if all these documents were on a "main server"
in an office, how would you locate the document the searcher was looking for?
We’d assume it would be the most popular one everyone else was talking about
and using (links). We’d also assume i’d be probably one that had been used for a while
(Age).

(2005) On January 18th, Google created the "no follow" tag and began tracing links
that shouldn’t count as a "popularity" vote. They shouldn’t give value to your rankings
and standings in the engines.

In December of 2005 the entire game changed with the "Big Daddy" update. Many
of those changes are still in effect today.

Now, a link is not just a link… (Well, except maybe on Yahoo…) But MSN & Google
have decided to include the idea of "trust".

Trusted links are those that come from OLDER more credible sites. Sites that are
linked to other major outlets like Associated Press, Reuters & CNN and similar.
The NUMBER of links alone is truly just an imaginative number that means nothing.
3 Links from CNN, BBC & other press could easily out rank a site with 3,000 links
from unknown sites.

(2005-2007) Birth of Web 2.0 & Social Media In Search

Sites like digg.com and social bookmarking as well as social networking like ryze,
linkedin, facebook and literally thousands of other ones popped up as well. They’re
now starting to shift the results on Google results like a tsunami under the ocean
simply thru popularity.

What Matters Today? Modern Information Retrieval Via Google.

Things have changed ALOT since 2006. Some major things have been implemented
that are evolving to this moment.

I’m starting a website called GoogleMythKiller.com (feel free to signup but it’s not
even close to ready yet…)

I’m going to dispell things like.. .

Can A New Website Rank In Google?

YES! It can, want to know how? Sign up.. I’ll show you how with Few links and no
promotion, you could show up as a major player.

Does Pagerank Matter?

No, and I’ll tell you why it shouldn’t be a part of your planning.

Can you get banned for duplicate content?

Nope. Will duplicate content rank, yup! I’ll explain more about that too.

Lastly, another big one. Can you get links too quickly? Yes!

There are some types of links where you can get over 100,000 overnight (yes, that’s a real
number) and Google will value every one of them. And there are other scenarios, where
you can get 50 in one day and get bumped out of the index… Scared yet? If you don’t know
what i’m talking about, you owe it to yourself to find out more.

This Week’s take away…

Google isn’t built by web marketers, it’s built by Engineers. Engineers think logically and
very scientifically. Look at your website navigation.

Navigation should be very simple and look much like a science lab textbook or university
website..

Home page (Menu)
- News
- Press
- Updates etc.

- Health
- Heart
- Lungs
- Breathing
- Resperatory

See how every topic is nested inside another topic? Consider your blog categories on this
same level. Do you keep on topic & Use lots of related words within each category?

When sites like this get spidered they gain instant crediblity & trust within google. It’s just one
part of over 200 signals google uses to control the results showing up when you search.

I will begin from credible sources to cite MOST of those 200 signals and the guestimate
on weighting based on 13 years observing the SEO Industry.

Sincerely,
Daniel J Deyette