What’s New On Linkbuildr

Well it has been a slow couple days for great posts, but I’ve managed to create over 17 drafts of new posts that will be coming out over the next week or two…and they’re gunna be great. I’m hoping to get some good discussions out with some of the articles as well set apart this blog from the others within the link building community.I’d like to thank every one for the kind comments and support I’ve gotten from readers and companies within the link building community…it keeps me going!

First up I have started mapping out my link building services which I’m now offering more to the general public. I generally work with only a few clients every couple of months because I’m mainly working on my own projects which I can rely on for income. But lately I’ve been wanting to sink my teeth into other new projects and let me stuff sit on autopilot. So take a look at the page which is linked at the top of the page and let me know what you think about my prices, grammar mistakes or whatever else!

I’ve been working solely on Ubuntu which is all fine and dandy because I’ve been using Linux since I was 13, its just that I’m used to doing my video editing magic with Sony Vegas but instead I’ve been learning Cinelerra. It’s an open source video editing suite that is about the best and only choice I have with Linux, so it’s taking me a little more time to get the podcast in order. To top that all off Linux has one of the worst track records for MIC input and sound recording so naturally I’m having trouble recording the audi for the screencast portions of the podcast. I’ve been reviewing the Raven SEO Tools for the first episode and I need to get my ass in gear to get it all together.

Tomorrow I get to visit the office that houses the Infobarrel crew and I’ll be recording more podcast stuff with them on site. They live about an hour from me so I’ll be loading up my iPod and heading out the door first thing in the moring, hopefully in time to make sure they get no work done for the day! If anyone missed my post on the site I suggest you check it out because this site is moving!

I cleaned up the ad block on the right as you may have noticed, and took out all the advertising from companies I don’t use, or would ever recommend to a client. This should provided a smoother reading experience and if you see advertising on here now, it’s stuff I’m using and very proud to be using. I’m going to be opening up an actual job board on here in hopes of adding more quality link building resources for the community.

The Link Building Forums are slowly kicking with a couple of members every few days, but I need more people to join up and help start the community. I want to make this a place of total link building orgasmic reading and conversing. A lot of the forums these days are filled with repeat questions(cough DPF cough) and information which is starting to drive me nuts. If I see a post titled “how do I build links with blogs” etc you know I’ll be bringing down the ban hammer! I’ve created many different sections which should help bring out unique discussions and tactics to your everyday link building routine.

Want to keep up with me or get in touch through AIM?

Twitter = http://twitter.com/linkbuildr

AIM = linkbuildr

Skype = Linkbuildr

SEO Smart Links Wordpress Plugin

I needed a new plugin to handle all my internal link building efforts, and Smart SEO Links does the job just fine. Directing the flow of link juice around your site is important to pass on authority as well direct readers to posts they wouldn’t otherwise discover. Another great benefit of using this plugin is never having to copy and paste your affiliate codes all the time which is starting to become a pain in the ass for me. Keep in mind that you don’t want too many anchor text’s popping up all over the place or you’ll start to give Google a worry. Just think about your main keywords and you’ll have an easier time keeping the number of anchored links down. Thankfully this plugin makes all of the above a breeze to setup and get going;

Features:

• Find keywords in your posts, pages and comments and link them to your other posts, pages, categories and tags
• Full control with customizable options
• Ignore list for keywords you do not want to link
• Improves your site’s interlinking
• Control external links with custom keywords
• Add nofollw attribute or open links in new window
• Caching for speed - make sure you have define(’ENABLE_CACHE’, true); set in your wp-config.php

Getting Value From Social Media Links

This week we’ve got a quick and dirty Whiteboard Friday about how to make use of all of those social media profiles you’ve been building. The trick: don’t let them sit idle! You’ve got to network them a little in order for them to do you any good (read: links and rank).

White To Black Hat Link Building Techniques

This week we’re joined in Whiteboard Studios by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric knows a thing or two about link building campaigns, so he and Rand discuss the many tactics one can employ when building bulk links, everything from shiny white hat to shady black hat, and everything in between.

Using Trust Rank to Guide Your Link Building

This week Rand discusses Trust as a ranking factor: how it originated, what it may look like, and how you can use it when planning your link building campaigns. The closer you can get to major authority sites, the more trust your links are likely to have, and as we all know, trusted links are the most powerful links.

6 Untapped CMS Resources For Theme Link Building

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the different open source CMS’s that are coming out these days, mainly for link building opportunities. If you’re a Wordpress or Joomla theme designer you most likely have distributed free themes in order to build links and get exposure for your work. I’m aware that Google has been watching this practice closely because a lot of folks were selling the link spots(Sponsored Themes Discussed @ Webmaster World). Now if you’re a web design company or freelancer, there is no problem using this as a form of marketing. Unfortunately the theme market for the likes of phpBB, vBulletin, Wordpress, Joomla, yaddy yadda, is way over saturated these days.

There are all sorts of new open source CMS’s coming on the market, and a handful of them are starting to get a large use rbase. There are CMS’s for DIGG clones, forums, social networking sites, social bookmarking, web 2.0 and new blogging platforms. These are perfect times to grab some new business and get a chance to work with a different platform. Because there are so many the possibilities are endless, and would be a great way to expand your design firm to the next level. Lets take a look at 6 CMS’s that are growing rapidly and are desperately in the need of both free and premium themes.

Pligg is almost perhaps too popular to be called an “untapped resource”, but since it makes for a perfect first example I’ll go with it. I’m not sure on the exact number of downloads, but looking at a few factors indicates that there have been a few hundred thousand downloads of Pligg in the past few years. You can search for “powered by pligg” which is nowhere near acurate at 1.5 million results. That and the fact the forum has 35 thousand members is how I can up with that number. The search phrase “Pligg Temaplates” is searched for on average 40xday. The competition in the search listings ins’t too scary and there are already a bunch of places you can promote your theme like in the Pligg forum.

Elgg is quite possibly the most popular open source social networking platform at the moment. The software its self is brilliant and there is no secret as to why it’s so popular. There are plenty of opportunities for theme design with Elgg both on the forums, gaining top rankings and freelance sites. The one thing I did notice about Elgg, which is also what made me write this post, is that there is a serious lacking in the theme department. You can advertise your free themes within the community, on various Elgg theme sites and try and rank for some quality keywords.

ModX has been gaining a lot of ground for its triumphant web 2.0 properties featuring clean SEO friendly code, and sexy Ajax to make it all spiffy. Their forum is very active in not only English, but many other languages which also shows a strong sign that ModX will be here for a long time to come. There is a strong need for paid and free themes and the link building opportunities are definitely there.

Social Web Content Management System(bloody mouthful) is a fork off from the first mentioned Pligg software and in my opinion looks and works like it will be the true champion of Digg clones soon enough. Now is a great time to build some links and buzz by creating great templates for this rapidly evolving CMS. Right now there are a few sites where you can submit your template as well hit up the template section on the user forum.

Concrete5 is one of my favorite up and coming CMS’s and I’d like you guys to take a minute to check out the demo, features and scalability of the framework. You PHP and Ajax programmers are going to have a fun time with this CMS. I trulely believe that Concrete5 will be making big waves in the near future and they’re going to need theme designers! Why not use the opportunity to build some quality links on this web 2.0 platform.

Plone is most likely a new word to your vocabulary, and it was fairly new to me up until the other day. Plone is a well supported and heavily used CMS that boats a long list of big sites running the platform. This CMS is great for community based websites as well sites that have a magazine/minimal feeling to them, so you’ll be able to get creative with your design. This is another example of a great CMS needing more designers and present more opportunities to build more links.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of possibilities for design teams to generate more business and build links from theme resources that are not over saturated. I hope you designers out there found this useful and that it gives you a ton of new ideas on how to drum up more business.

Google’s Note This Feature And Its Future In The Algorithm

I haven’t seen too much banter lately on the Google “Note This” feature within the search listings so I thought I’d see what you guys had to say. I’ve been noting my stuff and other sites for the past 6 months, unfortunately there really isn’t a way to tell if it has had any effect. I have no doubt in my mind this data will be used within Google’s ranking algorithm, just when is the question. How many of you have been using the Note This feature?

Link Building With Micro-Blogging Platform Kwippy

I’ve been searching around looking for do follow micro-blogging platforms because I’ve seen a huge increase of Twitter clones. A lot of these services don’t allow anchor text, but with a proper friends list and do follow links going out you can still help increase the link juice flow from utilizing a service like Kwippy. Kwippy is very much the same as Twitter except for the do follow link features in your updates, aswell there is a section to store public bookmarks socially and get some more link love from that. The platform is well put together and is very easy to read so it might make a good place to get some marketing done.

Raven SEO Tools

I want to introduce the few of you who haven’t heard of these most amazing set of SEO tools I’ve ever got my hands on to this date. I’m going to be playing around with Raven SEO Tools this weekend and report back next monday, hopefully with the first episode of the Link Building Podcast. I’m going to be working on a new project of mine and using it as the demo website for my initial tests. I’d like to thank Matt and Jon from Sitening for getting in touch and giving me the opportunity to play around with their amazing software. Sitening, for those that don’t know, are the creators of Raven among other things. They are a very well respected Internet Marketing company as well do some very fine Web Application Development.

Busby SEO Test or Busby SEO SPAM Test

I’ve been seeing more and more on the Busby SEO Test, and no I’m not trying to rank or win for it with this post. SEO contests in general are good for the industry, but I’m seeing how badly this one has gotten out of control with spam of all sorts. You can see the results of who’s on top at this moment in time, and just from analyzing the backlinks of the top people you can clearly see the comment spam tactics at play. This blog itself has got a lot of (pardon my french) shitty comments from contestants with the anchor text in place, and over at my buddy Joel Drapper’s blog I just notice one as well which got me digging more into the contest.So lets take a quick look into the top “performers” for the challenge, but keep in mind some of my data is from Google Canada, so depending on what data center you’re looking from it might be a little different.

I used two different tools to analyze the backlinks of the first two listed there, Yahoo Site Explorer and Backlink Watch. It took me no longer than a few minutes to sell all the blog comments these contestants have used, as well a bunch of other link spamming on sites such as DeviantArt. Now the way these contestants have used questionable tactics is not something you’d want to do for a client, or even for your own site. In the long run Google will catch onto this but for now there’s no doubt that anchor text is still the number one way to rank.

So go ahead and check out some of the contestants links from DeviantArt, blog comments and link exchanges. The comments left behind on blogs are the usualy one liners “thanks for the great information” which defeats the whole purpose of commenting on blogs, and is now a form of spam. This kind of link building gives us all a bad name.

So without getting too nasty or diving in any more into this silly contest what are your thoughts? Am I being rude and unfair? Have you been spammed by a contestant and want to vent? There is a positive and that is the example and real world results you can see from link building, good or bad.