For some reason everyone is press release crazy at this time of year so I’m always testing and trying out new sites. There are a lot of press release services out there so it’s hard to pick which one to go with, and it really depends on who you want to target. Chances are good that if your industry is big enough, there will be a niche specific distribution network out there to target. If you want to get some news out to as many people as possible, then you need to play some with of the big boys. I’ve recommended PRWeb many times before, and most of you most likely use them on a monthly basis.

I’m going to urge you to check over 24-7 Press Release for your next PR blast because they’ve got a whole other network you might want to tap into. These folks are one of the bigger players in the PR world and you get a pretty sweet deal out of what they charge. There are several press release packages that range from free to the mid hundreds which isn’t too much of a problem for most medium to large corporations. It also doesn’t hurt to take advantage of getting a link from their site alone which is quite authoritative, and is only going to do your link profile some good.

The different packages which you can see if my poorly edited photo can be seen here in better detail, but take a close look. Tons of affordable options to choose from but my choice would be the $139 package which gets you a nice report which is great for clients. The one thing  I didn’t see listed in these options was the business directory that 24-7 Press Release has on their site. It is an extra cost but if you check out the indexing rate, Pagerank on the internal pages and the Alexa of these folks then you’ll quickly see it’s worth the cost.

I always like to go through the more popular categories of news releases and sniff out their backlinks to see how the news did for them. This should give you an idea of the type of sites you may have the potential to get your news listed on. You might even be able to sniff out a few places within your industry that you can submit your news directly to.  There are always little link building gems to be found in your niche so make sure to give it a good look.

The fine folks over at SEOmoz have just released access to a new and sexy (I know I have a problem) backlink analysis and reporting tool powered by Linkscape. If you don’t already know about the SEOmoz Pro Tools then let me give you a piece of information that should make your mouth water. Linkscape now contains over 700 billion links from nearly 65 billion pages on the web, so that’s a no brainer for any link builder.

Open Site Explorer is a clean and easy to use interface much like Link Diagnosis except it has so much data I nearly had to change my underpants. For the next 33 hours it is fully open to the public for usage so I suggest you get on it and start playing with it. The best part I think is so far from what I’ve seen are the filtering options which is going to make my life a whole lot easier.

Rand just finished up a meaty post on Open Site Explorer which sums up pretty much everything I’d comment on, so go read his post on it. This is definitely going to be worth the purchase if you’re serious about your link profile, and of course that of your competitor’s!

You and I both know that there are a lot of excessive link spammers out there, especially when it comes to blogs. If you like at programs like Xrumor, they target weak guestbook scripts, insecure forums and out of date blog comment systems. I’m not sure why I haven’t heard of Bad Behavior until now, but it is definitely worth tinkering around with. There is a wordpress plugin for the likes of me and the other millions of users, but there is also some code to easily integrate into your PHP framework.

I’m planning on getting a forum of sorts going on here soon and the last one was overrun with link spam. Bad Behavior analyzes incoming HTTP headers, the IP address, and other data to determine if it is coming up rotten. Since it is mostly acting at the TCP level you don’t have to worry about the site loading slowly. They’ve tested it successfully on a site with over 100,000 unique visitors a day. There is actually quite a lot to the inner workings of Bad Behavior and they graciously have provided a wealth of information on how it works.

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.

This plugin is of course free and done out of hate for spam, so if you too hate spam as much, make sure to donate to their efforts. I’m going to be testing the plugin out over the next month so I’ll update this thread with any notes on how it performs. If you have any questions ask away in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Download Link: Get Bad Behavior Here
Blocked Googlebot Warning: http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/63850/
Thanks to Alex from Application Developer who pointed out this to me.

Here’s another really cool video from the Raven SEO team showcasing a whole slough of features from the software. If you’re finding yourself drowning in statistics and keeping track of where your links are coming from then take a real good look at this video. I really like where this software is headed and you’re hard pressed to find anything that matches it.

I’m finally writing something and even though it’s a little bit promotional, it’s still something you can build links with. A couple social media addict friends of mine just recently launched PRbuzzer to fill the need for a stronger buzz. The main idea is to provide a powerful press release service that would not only get the word out, but maximize the link acquisition and harness social media traffic.

There has been talk of Google not passing much value to links via press releases and I can see why people would say that, and why it’s true. A lot of people use press releases for the sole fact of garnering links, and not because they have PR quality news to get out. This usually leads to a uninformative press release that should most likely not have gone out to the public.

PRbuzzer has in house PR writer’s that are there to make sure your release is the highest quality possible. Your release gets put through all the usual avenue of authoritative news sites, sent to tens of thousands of journalists and is distributed through a network of over 400,000 RSS partner’s. Those RSS partner’s I found are  best utilized by carefully selecting the tags in your release.

The social media aspect is still in beta, and by that I mean the Twitter and retweet network they’re building will be a huge asset. Twitter is a great way to bring some targeted eyes to your news and they’re working on building quite the “Tweet Presence”. You can follow the PRbuzzer Twitter account if you’re wanting to follow releases and participate in the social media aspect. They’re growing the account naturally in order to make sure the most amount of social interaction takes place.

On top of it all your business gets a profile in the PRbuzzer business directory which includes a custom written “About Us” profile, links to your companies websites and social media accounts as well. Every press release put through will also be added to your companies news archive which is housed on your company profile in the directory. They are also working on a widget your company can embed into their news section which helps you promote your companies news on your website and social media profiles.

I’ve been testing it with my clients and I’ve quite happy with the results in regards to links obtained and the traffic it has generated. No press release gets massive traffic despite what some vendors might say, so keep that in mind when hunting for a PR service. Although it’s a new service you still get those sexy sexy links, your news gets pushed around all over and you should be pretty happy with the outcome. This post by the way was not asked for, paid for or exchanged for any midnight loving.

*I have been told that I can offer a discount to try it out, so anyone wanting to just use my contact form to get in touch! You can also use the PRbuzzer contact page and tell them linkbuildr(Ryan) sent you.

How many of you are link building on a team? I fall into that category and work with 2 other local business partners for my clients. We currently use Google Docs and a shared spreadsheet to manage out link building efforts, but this gets really messy. After 3-5 months of working on a client you can imagine how cluttered that spreadsheet is. As well, after that amount of time you’re bound to start running into the same places to build links.

Use the Link Manager to track your link building efforts. Record links efficiently using the Add Link form — available via the Raven Web Application and its companion Firefox Toolbar. Easily manage the link status, contacts and tasks related to each link.

Create link records that auto-fill data for you, including link and website details. You can also have Raven check to see if any changes have occurred on an active link. If the nofollow attribute was added, the anchor text changed, the PageRank changed, or the link was removed – Raven will automatically alert you.

The amount of hours that go into building links can get ridiculous, and the last thing you want to do is back track. With more than a couple people working on the same link campaign I find that wading through a large spreadsheet just isn’t working well anymore.
So with that being said check out this video to see how Raven SEO manages keeping track of your link building efforts, and if you like it get on board! There is currently a price drop going on until December 31st, and if you’re still not sure sign up for a free trial.

Linbuilding and SEO are worlds where numbers help.  If we have more numbers, we can make better decisions based on new data. And come on,  who doesn’t want some free new data?  Recently, ping.fm gave us the ability to”track incoming statistics on the URLs you generate.”  Aww dude, exciting.

We track all sorts of cool information like link visits, unique visits, referrals and referral country origination. This is all presented to you in a fancy interface that let’s you see how well your posted links are tracking with your social network audiences. We think it’s pretty rad!

While we gather some feedback from you folks, we will be pondering other statistics you might want to see on your links and adding to the output every so often. You should totally give us a shout and put some bugs in our ears.

This is a user-opt in feature that you can turn on here.

If you’re curious for more, you can read all about how this works right over heeeeere!

They then finished with:

We have more stuff coming out soon, so keep on the lookout for forests full of unexplainable and ridiculous magic.

Adam & Sean
Ping.fm

Which is basically the reason I don’t really mind reading ping.fm news. But that’s another post altogether.

Anyways, you should start tracking your ping.fm link stats if you’re not already!

Author Bio

Geoff is a webmaster and SEO ninja, visionary, dreamweaver, plus actor. He has been working on line for over a decade and has been mastering SEO for the past four years. He maintains many websites and likes to share and discuss SEO tactics.

There are a lot of great SEO tools out there but not many of them cover just about every aspect. Raven SEO Tools have been around for a few years, have been heavily tested and tuned which has resulted in a sexy set of tools. A lot of you have surely heard of them and might have even talked to Raven Jon on one of the social media sites out there. He’s taken the time to make a handful of great videos and I’m going to showcase them over the next few weeks. I am an affiliate with them which I like to tell my readers, but I only push products I use myself.